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War movies after September 11
Among the many casualties of the September 11 terrorist attacks were Hollywood war movies which suffered the biggest backlash.
John Woo’s Windtalkers, an MGM second world war drama about Navajo soldiers who use their native language to convey secret radio messages, was abruptly pulled from release. Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, a US$ 90m movie about the disastrous US raid on Somali rebels in Mogadishu in 1993, produced by Pearl Harbor’s Jerry Bruckheimer, was shifted from November 2 to March 1. Behind Enemy Lines, a US dollars 40m drama about a US pilot whose plane was downed by Serbian missiles in Bosnia in 1995, was moved from October to January. Warner Bros pulled back Arnold Schwarzen-egger’s terrorists-bomb-skyscraper picture Collateral Damage's releasing date out of respect for the victims. It had been scheduled for US release on October 5. MGM also halted the production of Nosebleed, in which Jackie Chan plays a World Trade Centre window cleaner who is embroiled in a terrorist plot to destroy the Statue of Liberty. And Hart’s War, a court room drama-cum-POW-movie set during the second world war and starring Bruce Willis, was shifted from a December release to next spring.
“Immediately afterwards, a lot of people were scared,” says Randall Wallace, who wrote and directed We Were Soldiers, the still-unfinished Mel Gibson Vietnam flick. “But that period has passed. I don’t think there’ll be a long drawn-out period of mourning in the movies.” The mourning period has indeed passed. In the wake of the new mood of US patriotism and the speed of victory in Afghanistan, US war films have had their release dates brought forward to capitalise on a rapidly rekindled US fascination with its own military.
Behind Enemy Lines has been particularly quick out of the traps. It was due to be released in the US early next year but, like rival war movie Black Hawk Down, is being screened in America over Christmas. “With its hip-hip-hooray tone and pumped-up patriotic volume, Behind Enemy Lines may prove to be particularly suited to these increasingly bellicose times,” said LA Times film critic Kenneth Turan. And he has been proved right — the film is doing well at the box office.
Even Arnie’s Collateral Damage is shortly to appear in cinemas. The film, whose release was deemed insensitive in September, has become money-spinningly topical. Director Andrew Davis originally had Arabs as terrorists, but later decided that the bad guys should be Colombians, “because there are too many films about Arab terrorists”.
Only a few months ago, Hollywood had a crisis of confidence about war movies: audiences didn’t care to see gritty grunt dramas any more, so Hollywood gave them, for good or ill, military movies with a twist. Pearl Harbor, for example, a film that dealt with one of the key moments in 20th century US history, was reduced to little more than a video game with romantic sub-plot attached. No matter, because it did good box office — the biggest budget example of what is now called the ‘greatest generation’ cycle, which also includes Saving Private Ryan and the TV series Band of Brothers. On the other hand, the deeply anti-nostalgic Three Kings, set during the Gulf war and starring George Clooney, was forced to disguise its liberal sentiments with a head-pounding action-movie format. Predictably, perhaps, it fared disappointingly on its release in 1999.
But the corollary of this trend was that films dealing with the grim realities of the military experience per se could no longer be certain of a market. “We were trying to make a military movie at a time when nobody gave a shit about the military,” says Wyck Godfrey, executive producer of Behind Enemy Lines.
But fortunately for Godfrey, and other film-makers who were working on war movies before the September 11 attacks, things have changed. So much so, in fact, that Hollywood is planning more military movies. And bearing in mind that it takes, on average, two years for a film to go from conception to release, this is a tricky judgment call for Hollywood. Will the gung-ho mood among movie-goers persist until 2003? The US movie industry clearly thinks so, and is sinking millions of dollars and creative intelligence into military film projects right now.
But even though many of the new and looming films resound with pumped-up patriotic volume, most involve US military disasters that may, so the argument goes, give audiences pause for thought. This year, the Vietnam epic We Were Soldiers will be released, the story of the US’s humiliation at landing zone X-Ray in Vietnam, when 400 elite US troops were attacked by 2,000 Vietcong at the outset of the conflict in 1965. In Black Hawk Down, a group of Somali rebels parade the corpse of an American serviceman through the streets of Mogadishu. And everyone knows how the Alamo ended. Not even John Wayne was getting out of that one alive. And even Sayles and Howard can’t overturn that historical reverse — can they? US audiences are learning that war isn’t just about winning without casualties to their troops.
Superficially, this is a good argument. But what’s striking about nearly all these films is that they deal only with US military experience, and encourage us to think of America’s enemies as irreducibly evil. These films don’t encourage us to believe that those enemies have justifiable political goals or even to think of them as human beings. And they leave Americans worrying about what war involves in terms of the US body-bag factor rather than considering the legitimacy of their military’s enterprises.
But worst of all, Black Hawk Down boasts the same grammar as Cy Endfield’s 1964 film Zulu, in which wave after anonymous wave of black men raced towards the heavily outnumbered British troops at Rorke’s Drift. If we were engaged as viewers, it was by the hope that the British guns and bayonets would silence the dark hordes. When we see the Somali rebels on rooftops in Black Hawk Down, we hunger for the deaths of these heavily armed anonymous black men, in order that our heroes, the Americans — white, all bar one of them — can get out alive. Release comes blissfully: a machine-gun sprays bullets at a remarkable rate from a helicopter, rapidly dispatching the rebels who have been shooting on to the US troops pinned down in the streets below, thus satisfying our need to see the undifferentiated adversary extinguished. This may not be what you feel, but it’s what the logic of Scott’s film encourages you to want. Hollywood does not want the voices of the third world to be heard. In cinema, anyone who fights against US military morality doesn’t even deserve a back story, let alone to live into the last reel.
The industry will have played its part in making the US temperamentally incapable of fighting any other kind of war. —Dawn/Guardian News Service
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