Watched on Blu-Ray

Films want to change something in the minds of their viewers. Of course, there is also the kind that wants to purely entertain, but the majority wants to tell a story and at the same time broaden the horizons of its recipients. The word educational television is already lurking around the corner, dusty and bored. However, it can also do both: offer a good distraction from everyday life and impart knowledge worth knowing. "Lord of War" is such a fusion product, which not only educates in the framework of a self-made man story, but also makes your jaw drop like an exciting investigative report.

Despite the Ukraine conflict, which has been raging for over a year now, we in the Western world deny ourselves a peaceful life and completely suppress the topic of the arms trade. Yet the arms industry is as much a part of our Western economy as the automotive industry or agriculture. The big players in arms exports are the USA, Russia, China and France. And who is number five? Germany, which shipped 5.8 billion euros worth of armaments in 2020 alone. Weapons do not only end up in the hands of soldiers, rebels and peace fighters through legal channels. Politically unstable countries in particular, or those that have been subject to an arms embargo by the UN, have to resort to middlemen. And the dangerous business with the killing tools is extremely lucrative.

Director and screenwriter Andrew Niccol is above all a visual storyteller. The prologue of "Lord of War" alone, which follows the logistical path of a bullet from a factory into the head of an African boy via point-of-view, sums up the world of arms trafficking. Protagonist Yuri repeatedly breaks the Fourth Wall and speaks to us viewers, teaching us his business rules and skillfully finding cynical and true words. When Yuri turns back into an active character, he becomes a businessman and weapons lobbyist. His rhetoric is reminiscent of Nick Naylor's in "Thank You For Smoking." For example, Yuri says he'd rather the bullets miss their target. Whether he means it that way out of moral or economic interest is something everyone has to fathom for themselves. Piece by piece, his conscience is probed more and more. Sure, there are striking cliché moments, of which Nicolas Cage's acting is not innocent, but it is remarkable how much the main character clings to her calling. She will be alone in the end, and a fate like that of her competitor Simeon Weisz (Ian Holm) comes ever closer.

For every ten films with Nicolas Cage, there's usually one good one. "Lord of War" is such a hit. His stoic, conscienceless suit is like a foreign body in the theater of war. The comparison of the arms dealer to a salesman reverberates: You walk your heels off and look for business. The merchandise still seems arbitrary at the beginning until it too finds its way into his hands and is used. Thus, in the course of the film, a businessman in strange places becomes a kind of Mephisto, dragging boxes of death and violence behind him. He doesn't pull the trigger, but puts a gun in the hand of every financially solvent buyer. The demand creates itself. Cage as Yuri Orlov (a fusion of five real gun dealers in history, according to Andrew Niccol) embodies the American Dream in which all you need is enough diligence and will, and you'll make it. At the beginning still pushing a mountain of debt in front of him, his career in times of turbo-capitalism is a prime example to generate even more debtors.

At the time of its theatrical release, "Lord of War" did rather averagely at the box office. However, the production budget was collected. Over the last 20 years, the film developed into a movie tip not only because of its biting cynicism, but also because of its seemingly untouchable subject matter. Arms trafficking, especially in the form of exports by Western governments, is still a taboo in the film world and can at most be viewed as a comedy like "War Dogs". Precisely because of its frightening topicality, if only in preparation for the recently announced sequel "Lords of War" with Bill Skarsgård as Yuri Orlov's son, it would make sense to show this film in schools to present to a new generation of film fans that the business of war is indeed still a sad reality.