It sounds like a premise ripped from today's headlines: A band of soldiers who believe they're defending Western civilization risk their lives in a far-off desert war fighting the blood-thirsty followers of a fanatic Muslim leader.

This is the subject of A.E.W. Mason's 1902 novel of Victorian honor, The Four Feathers, which has been filmed seven times, and it would seem to be relevant to some of the issues facing the American soldiers currently fighting Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in the Middle East. But this most recent version boots away the opportunity, because director Shekhar Kapur (Elizabeth) and screenwriters Michael Schiffer and Hossein Amini can't figure out how to handle the British Empire.

In the novel and every previous movie adaptation, all the creative parties involved assumed the righteousness of the imperialist enterprise, and their fiction's central characters subscribed to the values that made it work. Nowadays nobody would want to endorse the racist, colonialist aspects of the British Raj. But Kapur and his collaborators try to solve the problem by revamping their premise according to currently fashionable notions of political correctness. Along the way, they wind up draining their story of its dramatic impact.

Harry Faversham (Heath Ledger) is a young British officer in the 1890s whose father (Tim Pigott-Smith) is a well-regarded general. He and his best friend, fellow officer Jack Durrance (Wes Bentley), are in love with the same woman, Ethne Burroughs (Kate Hudson). When Harry and Ethne announce their engagement, his entire regiment cheers, including Jack.

At the same time, their unit is mobilized to put down an uprising in the Sudan, which is under British control. Harry resigns his commission just before he's to ship out. Three of his regimental comrades (Michael Sheen, Kris Marshall and Rupert Penry-Jones) send him white feathers as symbols of what they consider to be his cowardice.

When his fiancÈe Ethne gives him a fourth, Harry is so shamed he believes he must take decisive action to re-establish his good name and takes off for Sudan on his own.

There he disguises himself as a black native and tries to catch up with his unit to help them defeat the rebels.

In order to understand where Kapur and his screenwriters went wrong, it's important to grasp the values of that period and how they would affect Jack, his regimental comrades and Ethne. The British army provided the muscle that kept the empire together, but its officers believed they were doing more than advancing their homeland's economic interests. They also thought the empire propagated a superior civilization based in part on Christian values and that they must fight to preserve it.

In keeping with the contemporary zeitgeist, Kapur chooses to underline this in a negative way, deviating from the original. We see an Anglican vicar bless the regiment's mission as a necessary means for the achievement of the empire's higher purposes. This is meant to stand in ironic counterpoint to the officers' later racist behavior.

In the real British Empire, all this was held together by a code of honor that everyone shared. In the novel and the earlier film versions, Harry is presented as violating this code by refusing to go to the Sudan. No one, including his fiancÈe, can forgive him. But Kapur is determined to find other reasons to explain behavior he hopes contemporary audiences will find more congenial.

“I sometimes wonder what a godforsaken desert in the middle of nowhere has to do with Her Majesty the Queen,” Harry declares in explaining his resignation from the regiment. This is the logic of an anti-war protester during the Vietnam War, not the sort of argument likely to be offered by a 19th-century British officer.

“I don't care what people think. I just care about us,” Harry later exclaims to Ethne as he tries to persuade his fiancÈe to stick by him. These are appropriate sentiments to our contemporary me-first culture. Once again Kapur makes no attempt to re-create the Victorian mindset that privileges values other than this kind of personal satisfaction.

It gets even more anti-Western. The filmmakers give Harry a guide and mentor in Sudan who's black. This is to make us realize that our protagonist isn't a racist like his fellow officers. Abu Fatwa (Djimon Hounsou) is a Muslim tribesman who tells Harry he must look after him because “God has put you in my way.”

Fatwa's Islamic faith is the most positive expression of religion depicted in the film. In contrast, the filmmakers emphasize the weakness of the British commitment to Christianity. Before a major battle almost the entire Muslim army gets down on its knees. At the same moment only a single British officer is shown praying.

The film's pro-Muslim tilt also requires the uprising's fanatic leader to be kept off screen as there's no way to present his behavior in a way that's sympathetic or politically correct. This deprives the film of its natural villain.

Good movies have been made that deconstruct the British Empire (Passage to India, Gandhi). The Four Feathers can never be one of them. For its story to work, the audience must comprehend the centrality of the concept of honor to its main characters. The filmmakers are unwilling to acknowledge this and, as a result, our rooting interest is destroyed. Because we never hook into why Harry has to go to Sudan, we don't care what happens to him or his fellow officers during the well-staged action sequences. Their individual acts of bravery have no emotional or dramatic context.

John Prizer writes from

Washington, D.C.