Trailer
Plot summary
During the Yom Kippur War in 1973, a warplane from Israel goes down with a nuclear bomb aboard. In 2002 a Syrian scrap collector named Ghazi finds the weapon in a field in the Golan Heights and sells it on to Derek Olson, a South African arms trafficker working the black market. Olson's buyer is a neo-Nazi group led by the Austrian billionaire Richard Dressler, which wants Russia and the United States to destroy each other and leave a fascist Europe in charge. CIA analyst Jack Ryan is summoned by Director William Cabot to travel with him to Moscow for a meeting with Alexander Nemerov, Russia's new president. At a Russian nuclear facility the two men inspect, Ryan notices that three scientists on the roster are absent.
Cast
- Ian Mongrainas Syrian Radar Operator
Show all 20 cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Sum of All Fears (2002)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Tom Clancy blocked the adaptation for years. Unhappy with what Paramount had done to Patriot Games, he refused to hand over more rights until studio president Brandon Tartikoff settled with him for a large sum of cash.
- Harrison Ford walked away in June 2000 after failing to resolve script problems with director Phillip Noyce, and the series was restarted with a younger Jack Ryan. Ben Affleck heard about the $10 million offer while shooting a Pearl Harbor scene with Alec Baldwin, who told him to take it.
- The villains changed nationality between page and screen: Clancy's Arab nationalists became Austrian neo-Nazis. Viewers often assume the swap answered the September 11 attacks, but the film had finished shooting in June 2001.
- The Council on American-Islamic Relations spent two years lobbying against the use of Muslim villains, a campaign that ended on 26 January 2001. Screenwriter Dan Pyne said he also found Arab terrorists a cliche and drew instead on the rise of Jorg Haider in Austria.
- The US Army supplied fighter jets, helicopters, vehicles and soldiers, and the CIA advised on set, but the Pentagon objected to the sequence in which an American carrier is blown up, so that scene was rewritten.
- Baltimore was mostly Montreal: the football stadium destroyed by the bomb is the city's Olympic Stadium, other scenes used the Diefenbunker in Ottawa, and the interior of the carrier USS John C. Stennis was a set built for the television series JAG.
