While Sergeant Shaw is later awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for heroically saving his unit during an ambush, Major Marco is not so fortunate. More than a mere crowd-pleaser, Manchurian-which features superb acting, suspense, and surprise-raises questions about mind control and moral responsibility in a manner that points us to a fundamental truth about who we are as human beings.Ī remake of John Frankenheimer's 1962 classic, the 2004 version opens with a scene from Desert Storm, in which Major Ben Marco (Denzel Washington) and Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber) were comrades. This film, which zeroes in on the minds and memories of Gulf War veterans, pushed my own thoughts to such a deep level that I could barely find my way out of the theater. "Spell-binding" and "riveting" are words that I rarely choose to describe a movie's appeal, but I believe they aptly depict Jonathan Demme's The Manchurian Candidate.
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