Respond/React: The First Great Iraq War Movie
To start, I wish I could say that "The Hurt Locker" was a great film but it isn't. It's a decent thriller. Some people seem to think that it is an intense film but I just never got into it. It felt more like four or five loosely tied together set pieces than one cohesive movie. I also thought some of the directorial choices hurt the film and hurt some of the tense moments. (For an example, click Continue Reading below) The acting was solid but overall it's an interesting yet forgettable film.
The film did get me thinking about Iraq War films and how they never really seem to be all that great. The best modern war movie that's actually about war would probably be "Jarhead", which is hardly a universally loved (or even liked) movie. "Generation Kill" might be the best produced piece on the war but not many people saw it and it's also not all that memorable. (That being said, I still recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it. Throw it on your Netflix queue ASAP).
The fact of the matter is: if there is going to be a great Iraq war movie, it probably won't focus on the American military. There's really not a great story to tell. WWII had the Nazis. Vietnam had the draft. iraq doesn't really have an angle when it comes to creating a riveting fiction piece.
I think the best war movie might be a "Thin Red Line" type meditation that went into the psyches of: a Marine, a member of Blackwater, and an insurgent from Saudi Arabia. The insurgents andBlackwater soldiers who see war as their job have far more interesting angles to them IMO. (The founder of Blackwater said he wants his company to be to the US Armed Forces what UPS is to the US Postal Service.) Even the Iraqi forces have a more interesting predicament: do they defend their religion by standing with their corrupt country or do they surrender.
The film could compare the core beliefs of the Marine and the insurgent and how some of what makes the US the Great Satan is what conservatives decry here in the US. The film could examine the Saudi man torn between progress and the corrupting powers of freedom. He could see how Western influence is pulling people away from Allah. This wouldn't be too far off from what some of the staunch members of the Religious Right feel.
And then there's the Blackwater soldier. I think it's surprising that we haven't seen a movie about them yet. If the Middle East is the new Wild West then Blackwater is the new Pinkertons. In fact, the handful of Marines that I've spoken to about Blackwater have all used the same word to describe them: cowboys. And they meant that in both a positive and negative light.
It's on the nose but I could see a scene with the Marine praying to Jesus, the Saudi insurgent to Allah, and the Blackwater operative saying, "They don't pay me enough for this shit."
Just as I thought that Dan White's story was more interesting than that of Harvey Milk's, the Iraqi conundrum is far more interesting than a bunch of US grunts just following orders. "Traitor" was flawed (but also decent and on par with "The Hurt Locker" but I think that it came closer to what I was looking for than any other film. It's a tough film to write since respecting the insurgents while not glorifying them is a fine line to walk (and one that has gotten some people, like Bill Maher, fired in the past) and not a project that most studios or investors would be interested in funding.
The rest of this post includes spoilers and is a bit rambling so proceed with caution.
The one scene that I really thought was indicative of the problems with the direction was in the standoff when Brian Geraghty's character, Eldridge (the guy who was focused on dying) didn't know if he should shoot the gunman on the tracks. The way he kept asking if he should shoot made no sense to me. Earlier, he didn't pull the trigger to prevent Guy Pearce from being blown up and I thought he'd be trigger happy and perhaps shoot an innocent person. Why he would still be worried about shooting someone after he "let" one fellow soldier die seemed inexplicable to me. Maybe he was just incapable of taking another man's life even to defend his fellow soldier but I didn't really get that from him.
On top of that, we see from the get go that the person on the tracks is indeed a gunman. That basically put the whole weight of the scene on Eldridge's non-dilemma/weak internal conflict. The scene would have been a little more powerful IMO if he (and the audience) wasn't sure if the person on the tracks was just a shepherd or an actual insurgent. Do you risk taking an innocent life? is a better question than "Should I shoot this guy with a gun who's going to try to shoot me and my friends?"
I felt like they could have lost a couple of the bomb scenes and added something else to help develop the characters. This film felt like a dumber action movie version of "Tigerland" to me. Not that this film is "dumb" but it just didn't have the same depth as even a film like "Tigerland" did. It was just kind of empty to me.
I mean, if you're going to show a movie about how soldiers are becoming adrenaline junkies, at least show more of how that is affecting the others around them (both in their own military and the people of Iraq) To me, the best shot of the whole movie was Jeremy Renner's character standing in the ceral aisle. As a drug film, this movie just kind of focused 90% of the time on the guys getting high and very little on the actual ramifications of their actions.
Also (and this sounds bad, I know), one of the strengths of "Band of Brothers" was that you never knew who was going to make it. In this film, you pretty much knew that none of the major guys was going to die. It was like a horror movie sequel in that every time a new face showed up, you just knew that was the guy who'd get it, not the main characters.
I really think that there could be some interesting films about modern war made but writers and directors need to break from the model of the conventional war film. One of the great lines from "Jarhead" was when someone started playing The Doors and Swafford complained, "That's Vietnam music... can't we get our own music?" Hollywood can't keep trying to make Vietnam or WWII movies about what's going on in the Middle East. This conflict doesn't compare so the movies need to take a new approach if they want to truly be great.
