General William Sherman once said, “I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.” He was a decorated officer and combat veteran. He was wounded at Shiloh and was instrumental in defeating the Confederacy in the Civil War. He had seen war up close and didn’t recommend it.
His insight into the darker moments of history seems to be lost on our generation. Proof of which is the over romanticizing of war in Hollywood today.
There’s one genre of film that has always been important to every generation and that’s war movies. The criteria for good war depictions is that they’re gripping, tragic, heroic, and even comical at times. But above all, they should be honest. Or at least not chock full of propaganda.
War films shouldn’t be anti-war anymore than they should be pro-war. They should simply tell the story as faithfully as possible and remind the audience that while many wars may have been necessary, they are always and undeniably ugly.
It seemed for a while that Hollywood got it right. There was this period after Vietnam and before Afghanistan where many of the major war movies showed battles as they should be shown. They showed the chaos. They made the audience see the senseless violence up close and feel the terror that most combat vets experienced.
Platoon (1986), Black Hawk Down (2001), Hamburger Hill (1987), Glory (1989), Saving Private Ryan (1998), and many other films of that time did everything right. For one, they didn’t have the arrogance to judge war as necessary or unnecessary, but simply state that it happens, tragically. Second, the violence was often graphic but never gratuitous. Thirdly, they showed the enemies as human beings and not just cardboard cutouts, or failing that, they showed the toll taken on the civilian populations whose lives were ripped apart by conflict.
Director Oliver Stone, an actual Vietnam veteran, made Platoon with the intent of making an honest depiction of what he saw in his tour of duty. In Platoon, the actors don’t look like male models. The violence isn’t at all glorious or romantic. And most importantly, he showed what happened to the innocent Vietnamese civilians. In that film, the company of U.S. soldiers burn a village to the ground when they suspect those villagers of supplying the Viet Cong. The scene is horrifying. A mother is shot in front of her child, a young girl is raped, and a mentally challenged boy is brutalized. At the same time, you understand why the Americans do it. You don’t condone it, but understand the fear and mortal terror that motivates them.
The movie Glory shows a regiment of black soldiers achieving glory in heroically fighting the confederates, but at a terrible price.
Black Hawk Down faithfully depicts what happened in 1993 Somalia and leaves the audience regretting the violence rather than wishing for more.
Fast forward to today and you see movies like Act of Valor, 13 Hours, The Wall, or the latest recruitment ad, 12 Strong.
Almost all the new war movies follow a certain formula: The good guys are all handsome, the bad guys are cartoonishlly evil, the wives support their husbands no matter what, and morality is always on the side of the Red White and Blue. Worst of all, the main characters never have any vulnerable or emotionally unstable moments, which rather than making them seem courageous only makes them seem fake.
A perfect example is the remake of the film Red Dawn. In 1984, John Milius directed the fictional movie about a group of mid western teens fighting a guerilla war against a Soviet invasion. While fictional, the movie was actually very realistic. The story is plausible and the characters look like real teens. After fighting a brutal war in the Rocky Mountains during winter, the characters are shown as tired, dirty, and jaded. There are emotional scenes involving the Russians where you actually feel sorrow for them as they're being slaughtered. Because the movie is so realistically done, it should have a chilling effect on any American who sees it. Fear should grip the American viewers as they realize just how terrible it would be should we ever actually have to defend our homes.
Then there's the 2012 re-make. God damn. Red Dawn 2012 shows North Koreans occupying a town that shows no signs of oppression or even duress. The only sign of physical fatigue on the heroes is that they start wearing fingerless gloves. Even the trailers show stark contrast. Red Dawn 1984's trailer sets the audience up to see Americans fighting like the Afghani rebels against the soviets whereas Red Dawn 2012's trailer showcases your basic action movie with Chris Hemsworth saying, "They messed with the wrong family".
The contrasts can be seen in almost every aspect of old vs new military dramas. Watch the opening to Platoon verses the opening to Lone Survivor. Platoon opens with the new recruits landing in Vietnam to see corpses dumped in front of them and the hollowed-out shells of veterans walking past them. Lone Survivor opens with a motivational work out video.
verses
War films used to be comfortable with showing how ugly mass killing is. Now they gloriously showcase F-15 bombing runs. If you've seen the trailer for 12 Strong, then you know what I'm talking about. An elite team of 12 Green Berets lead by Chris Hemsworth on horseback take on the Taliban. It's basically sold as a kick-ass action packed badass blockbuster for all the bro's. I guarantee 12 Strong won't have a fraction of the realism or drama as just this one scene from Saving Private Ryan:
So, the question; what happened? How did we go from gritty and accurate to shiny and romanticized?
How did we go from this:
To this:
Well, the Call of Duty players aren’t going to be happy with this, but I think it has to do with war games making military combat seem fun. I mean, is it any surprise that an entire generation that grew up on ModernWarfare sees movies like Hacksaw Ridge as even mildly authentic?
Of course, video games are only part of it. The larger issue is the fact that movies being made about the Vietnam war were made by a generation that severely felt the impact of that conflict. In contrast to today where we have to remind ourselves that we still have soldiers fighting in the Middle East. To date, we have lost 6,831 soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Vietnam, we lost 58,220. That simple fact is that as horrible as the wars in the middle east have been, the American people simply haven't experienced them as directly as they did with Vietnam. This at least partially explains the lack of humanity in the current war film model.
That model has one theme: Special Forces guys are cool because they never give up. This is a huge departure from the message of older war films which was simply war is hell. The loss of integrity and honesty in how we depict war means that as a generation we don't know how to even talk about war.
And because I’m feeling particularly unoriginal today, I’m gonna end this with another William Sherman quote. “The scenes on this field would have cured anybody of war. Mangled bodies, dead, dying, in every conceivable shape, without heads, legs, and horses! I think we have buried 2000 since the fight our own & the Enemy, and the wounded fill horses, tents, steamboats and Every conceivable place. . . . I still feel the horrid nature of this war, and the piles of dead Gentlemen & wounded & maimed makes me more anxious than ever for some hope of an End but I know such a thing cannot be for a long long time. Indeed I never expect it or to survive it.”
