Affleck Becomes Clancy's Hero in New Movie
May 30 -- Is the world ready to be saved by Ben Affleck?
The Sum of All Fears, the fourth Tom Clancy novel adaptation, opens Friday, with Affleck as CIA analyst Jack Ryan, a role Harrison Ford and Alec Baldwin previously played.
Clancy thrillers have made for a lot of popcorn munching theater fun. But this is a movie about a terrorist strike in Baltimore with a nuclear bomb. How will viewers now react in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attack?
While some doubt the movie might have been made after Sept. 11 (it was shot months earlier), Affleck is proud of his work and has no regrets, hoping moviegoers will judge the film on its own terms.
'I Don't Have Any Ambivalence'
"I don't have any ambivalence," he told Diane Sawyer. "The movie is told tastefully. It's not sensationalism for the sake of titillation, showing disaster for 'oohs and aahs' from the audience."
Affleck talks more about the new movie, the tremendous challenge of perpetuating a character Baldwin and Ford created, and his own future on Primetime Thursday.
In the movie, a European neo-Nazi plants a nuclear bomb at a football stadium, hoping that the United States will blame Russia for the attack, sparking a nuclear war that will allow his fringe group to defeat East and West in one fell swoop.
Affleck plays a younger version of Jack Ryan. He's new at the CIA and has to convince the president to call off a U.S. counterattack. Images of Baltimore in flames and hospitals overrun with casualties may trouble some viewers, especially as the government warns of the possibility of future terrorist strikes.
But Affleck hopes moviegoers will judge this movie on its own terms and in context to Clancy's other work.
"There's another Tom Clancy book about somebody flying an airplane into the Capitol," he says, referring to Executive Orders, in which the president, Congress, and Supreme Court are obliterated when a Japanese terrorist crashes a 747 into the Capitol.
"I don't think anybody imagines that that was … the inspiration for this previous terrorist act. It's just a reflection of a really different world that we live in now, you know?"
Popular Reads
ABC News Live