YMMV / The Killing Fields

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• Awesome Music:
  • The haunting score by Mike Oldfield, his only full-length scoring assignment. Special mention goes to the choral music that plays over the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh.
  • "Imagine" by John Lennon, which plays as Syd and Pran are reunited. Its inclusion in the soundtrack makes an already heartwarming moment all the sweeter.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The film's even more tragic since 1996 after Haing S. Ngor, who survived the Khmer Rouge and played a fellow survivor, was gunned down by punks in an L.A. parking garage. And why? They wanted the locket he swore never to part with—a locket that held the picture of his wife, who had been killed by the Khmer Rouge. It has yet to be, and probably never will be, recovered.
  • John Malkovich and Julian Sands became very close personal friends after appearing together in this film, with Malkovich becoming godfather to Sands' son. In January 2023, Sands disappeared following a mountain-climbing trip and was found dead in June. Several weeks after Sands' disappearance, Malkovich spoke in an interview about how devastated he was over the loss of one of his best friends.
• Retroactive Recognition: John Malkovich has a supporting role as photojournalist Al Rockoff, Julian Sands as British journalist Jon Swain, and Bill Paterson has a bit part as a surgeon.
• Signature Scene: Pran discovering thousands upon thousands of skeletons buried in the mud, and half-rotted corpses floating in the river nearby.
• Special Effects Failure: The effects in the movie are decent for the most part; which makes all the more jarring when in the scene in which the Khmer Rouge execute other captives in front of the main characters, the blood splatter from one man being shot is briefly rendered as a red blotch in very blatant 80s-quality CG. This is also the only time such effects were used.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Pran saying goodbye to the people he befriended at the embassy as he's forced to leave, with the realization on both sides that he's probably doomed.
  • Phat, the one Khmer leader with any shred of decency, is killed by his comrades for speaking out against a pointless execution.
  • Despite Pran doing everything he can to save Phat's son as an act of gratitude, the boy winds up being killed by a land mine blast.
  • Just about everything that happens to the Cambodians at the time, especially the children.

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