By Armond White

Sahara

Directed by Brett Eisner

One reviewer's adage I swore never to use—"A thinking person's film"—must be applied to the roustabout flick Sahara. This movie opens at a time when audiences and reviewers have stopped thinking, which means that Sahara (like Kung Fu Hustle) has been both cheered and dismissed as mindless entertainment. Something's terribly wrong with the implication that fun movies shouldn't stir our consciousness. The fun of Sahara comes from demonstrating that an action-adventure film can deal with historical and political substance.

It should fascinate a thinking moviegoer to see our national heritage and world citizenship certified in a story about a globetrotting American (Dirk Pitt, the hero of Clive Cussler's adventure novels, played by Matthew McConaughey). Sahara's substance lies in its light-hearted reversal of the genre's customary imperialism; it's the kind of movie you would like the young Iraq-based American soldiers of Gunner Palace to have seen before they were shipped out. Instead of offering America First propaganda, Sahara is globally aware, with the intrepid American hero acquiring something like Pan-African consciousness.

McConaughey's Pitt is an athlete-historian-explorer on a curious expedition to recover an ironclad Civil War battleship. His search (and his personal recreational pursuit) takes him to Africa, where he encounters the World Health Organization's Dr. Eva Rojas (Penelope Cruz), who is tracking down a quickly spreading disease. Thus, the past meets the present in allegorical form. Only a moral idiot could avoid thinking about the urgent, humanitarian implications of this premise. (Sadly, we've already witnessed such idiocy in reviews that traduced In My Country to a "love story" and then condemned it.) Sahara doesn't exploit Africa's political and medical crises, but cagily engages them, an approach that respects the audience's intelligence.

Think about it: This film uncovers a hidden version of history in which a Civil War battleship crosses the Atlantic Ocean, reversing the route of the Middle Passage, and winds up playing a part in the liberation of an African nation! That's wild—and inspiring, too. Sahara provides historical continuity in the way it references the past, imagines the present and posits future political relations. In the supposedly enlightened Ride with the Devil, art filmmaker Ang Lee failed to rethink Civil War politics; he weasely romanticized the Confederacy. Surprisingly, it is through the forthrightness of its star-producer that Sahara confronts issues of race and history.

It doesn't take an alleged highbrow to show historical awareness; any pop artist with scruples can do the right thing. It's time that Hollywood took a prudent approach to such entertainment. Too bad its jingoist tradition (from King Kong to Raiders of the Lost Ark) prevents many people from understanding the need for this change and accepting that a B-star like McConaughey handles it so breezily.

There's a blue-eyed wildness to McConaughey—an inner scalawag—that few movies have captured. This one lifts his redneck bohemian temper onto Sahara's world stage as a casually enlightened American. By not denying his Texan heritage (even grooving to "Sweet Home Alabama"), McConaughey substantiates the film's outrageous premise where the tension of America's Civil War (the Union and the Confederacy battling over slavery and its economics) is resurrected in Africa. Old issues are revisited but with a modern awareness. In the almost terrific Reign of Fire, McConaughey proved himself a true B-movie star, capable of unexpected subversion. Here he's got a nice tan—a dark-haired Jeffrey Hunter/Jesus look—that's intriguingly ambiguous. His unabashed interest in southern history (and a cache of gold Confederate coins) makes credible the hard fact of American Civil War history being written into Nigerian consciousness.

Sahara seems a lightweight version of the Indiana Jones genre until you consider the ethics derived from that series. Spielberg's trilogy itself is a model of step-by-step enlightenment, achieving a striking, ironic conscientiousness in The Last Crusade. Although the trilogy's political sophistication didn't transfer to cheap knock-offs like Romancing the Stone or its cybernetic update in the Matrix movies, its integrity is certainly evident in Sahara's thoughtful hypotheses. This, not Sin City, is how the action/comix genre matures. There's real pop progress in how Dr. John's "Right Place Wrong Time" segues into an African chorale—a cross-cultural relocation. This idea is further played out in a remarkable moment when Pitt and his jocular partner Al Giordano (Steve Zahn) are stranded in the desert. They find a wrecked glider, rebuild it and windsurf across the dunes, moving to the party-hearty grooves of Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride."

Think about it: In Disney's 1993 animated feature Aladdin, the magic-carpet totem was usurped from Oriental legend and made into a vehicle that helped name-check international markets. But here, Pitt's "magic carpet" is constructed from Western ingenuity and righteous cultural awe. Such whopping ironies are irresistible. Sahara is propelled by what a pop anthropologist would call folkloric momentum. There's no reason filmmakers should buckle swash once again and go through the same old derring-do unless a sense of current geopolitical affairs becomes part of the story. The James Bond films try keeping up by flirting with modern politics, but not even Lee Tamahori's ethnographic Die Another Day worked this well. Sahara's convergence of Nigerian politics, an unchecked plague and international economics is fairly astute. (Lennie James' despot tells his ruthless European financer Lambert Wilson, "Don't worry. It's Africa. Nobody cares about Africa.") Director Bret Eisner juxtaposes this modern perception with real and f/x visions of ancient African sand-colored castles and forts.

Sahara's uniqueness is based on the wonder of the incongruous—poetic—image of a ship in the desert. It was a miraculous sight in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia that was repeated as an homage in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Eisner repeats the image provocatively—as a drawing in a cave to suggest that history is part of man's cultural heritage. Eisner's dreamlike preservation of African history calls upon filmgoers no longer content with sheer movement or the pacification of "action." Admittedly, Sahara is jumble of ideas, but that's hardly a negative in 2005, especially exciting when the ideas are this culturally resonant. That Pitt and Al don Lawrence of Arabia gear while setting out to rescue Eva and help the Nigerian underground is a perfect statement of the West's globalizing impulse.

Pitt's benefactor, a millionaire seaman played by William H. Macy, advises, "Make sure that history can be returned to its people." Few filmmakers follow that demanding goal, but those that do need an audience that understands it and are tired of movies with vapid heroics. When Al tells Pitt, "I'll find the bomb, you get the girl," it's the best post-modern action-movie dialogue, mocking the clichés that lesser movies would have us take seriously. Sahara distinguishes itself from the pack when Pitt participates in a contemporary civil war using the Union's rusted apparatus in the fight between a Nigerian tyrant and a people's leader. The denouement shows armed Africans standing behind the leonine American good guy, but also standing up for themselves. If movies can teach, then the lessons of Sahara—integrity through fun and fun through thinking—may be more important than Hotel Rwanda.