In the compelling, heartfelt adaptation of Tom Clancy's "The Sum of All Fears," terrorists do something awful on American soil. Seen the commercials? Despite director Robinson's protestations, the studio wants you to know what happens. What's remarkable is how well Robinson and his collaborators make visual the unspeakable in sweet shorthand, the choices of framing and editing constantly undercutting expectations. "Sum" is superb entertainment filled with real-world horrors, yet smart, melancholy and ultimately hopeful.

Shorthanding the elegant, off-kilter doomsday scenario, the 28-year-old Jack Ryan (Ben Affleck) works the Russia desk at the CIA. His boss, Morgan Freeman, is grooming him, invites him to a meeting with the Russian president. Complications ensue when rogue industrialists get their hands on a long-lost Israeli nuclear missile, intending to use it to start a shooting war between the U.S. and Russia. Already past its first cut on September 11, "Sum" shows what can go wrong in the heated moments. (As the President [James Cromwell] splutters, "This is too much goddamn bullshit and not enough fact!")

Talking to the smart, direct 52-year-old director, I wondered what boundaries he set to avoid making a tidbit of apocalypse-porn. "Sum," in fact, is more about fear, how decisions—"Lack of information and fear," he interrupts. "You mentioned apocalypse porn, and one of the things that we wanted desperately to avoid was getting off on the violence. Any time you work with special effects or visual effects, there is this almost irresistible attraction to blowing things up."

One of the commonly used software packages is even called Inferno. "Yes, yes, that's right. I knew this would be the approach a year before September 11 when we started. I said, let's be restrained. We didn't make any changes because of 9-11. Had we shot it and cut it in a more kind of get-your-rocks-off-on-the-violence way, yes, we would've had to re-cut it. I have no great need as a filmgoer, much less as a filmmaker, to see violence and death. It's not about a terrorist attack, it's about a response to a terrorist attack. Almost every act of violence in the film, except for [one], is cutaway or very short or in the background."

The most chilling, thrilling parts of the film are when Robinson and co-writers Paul Attanasio and Daniel Pyne convey what it's like to make life-or-death choices in seconds. There's a lot of "Fuck! What do I do?" "That's exactly right. Which is why we put the scene at the beginning with the president and his staff going through an exercise for an event like this. I wanted to show that when you plan for these things, everything goes smoothly. The equipment all works, information flows freely, everything you want to know, you learn. Decisions are made quickly and without a whole lot of trouble. In a real event, you don't get information, stuff doesn't work, tempers flare."

Attanasio wrote a draft for Harrison Ford, who played Jack Ryan in earlier Tom Clancy pictures. When the project quickly came together, with Affleck in the lead, the studio hired Pyne. "We had only a few months before starting. We were trying to get a handle on the broad strokes of the story at the same time we were trying to address the specifics of making the character younger. The mandate Dan was given was, make a few dialogue changes to make the character younger. But you can't do that! An example: In Paul's script, Jack Ryan, in his fifties and deputy director of the CIA, is in New Orleans, which is where the bomb goes off [in the novel]. He's got to get back to the Pentagon. He simply turns to somebody in the Air Force, says 'Get me a jet!' and they put him on a jet. Well, 28-year-old Jack Ryan, an analyst on the Russia desk, can't do that. Which is why we moved the Super Bowl to Baltimore, it's closer to Washington. We just had to adapt for a guy who wasn't powerful. In a way, I think it makes the script more interesting, because [our] Jack Ryan is a guy, when he does pick up the phone to call the president, they'll hang up on him."

As in "Changing Lanes," Affleck gives a terrific performance. "Ben is a very, very smart guy—thoughtful—he's not just glib. I wanted to embrace the fact that Jack was young. Not try to age him. Go for it, he's 28, he's not married yet, he's new to the CIA, and have fun with that. That's a more interesting route for a character. At the beginning, he should just play [him this way]: a nice guy with a desk job, a cute girlfriend, a cool career."

My favorite scene is when he's on a jet to Russia with Freeman, who encourages him to tell his girlfriend the truth about why he won't be home for dinner. "You know what, that was my first meeting with the studio. I met with [production head] John Goldwyn, he said, 'What's your take on the material?' and I said, 'Embrace the youth. Make it brand new.' I just spitballed this idea, he calls his girlfriend, [his excuse is] I work with the CIA, she hangs up on him. That was emblematic of where wanted to take it. And by the way, when we went to the real Russia desk at the CIA, I asked those guys who worked their, young guys, what do you tell your girlfriends? They say, 'Oh everybody knows we're CIA.'"

"The Sum of All Fears" detonates May 31.

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