Jace911
Spider-Dork
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*googles*
sweet monkey godzilla christmas, I thought Zero Dark Thirty was apologist bullshit but this is, like, actually monstrous
Project Ludovico
- Thread starter Athene
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*googles*
sweet monkey godzilla christmas, I thought Zero Dark Thirty was apologist bullshit but this is, like, actually monstrous
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My morbid curiosity need to be satiated. Having seen neither, what is wrong/apologist about both films?
Jace911
Spider-Dork
- Location
- The Gold-Bricking State
Zero Dark Thirty presents the idea that the CIA was tipped to bin Laden's safehouse by intel gathered from torture, which is complete horseshit according to the director of the CIA at the time.
Rules of Engagement has Samuel L Jackson's character order marines to open fire on a crowd of angry Arab protesters like they're the fucking Zerg ("WASTE THE MOTHERFUCKERS"), and then the movie spends the rest of the runtime painting him as the tragic hero being unfairly punished for making the Hard Decision.
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Captain Orsai
Davion Heavy Guards Captain
You just have to watch the sheer joy he takes in hamming it up like an industrial bacon farm in Masters of the Universe.
That's true, Langella's Skeletor is a joy to watch.
(genuinely intimidating, too; Langella brings serious presence to the role, making it clear that this Skeletor is not messing around)
- Location
- Luton Airport
It's reminiscent of Von Sydow as Ming the Merciless - clearly having a ball with the over the top cartoon villain role, but bringing actual acting chops to the thing.
teslashark
One of the brother site’s janitors
- Location
- Somewhere
That is memetic.
"No one blames Uncle Sam, for he is Sam Jackson!"
CompassJimbo
Where’s Your North?
- Location
- The former Rubber Capital of the World
Not enough. Now do you feel like a hero yet?
Sufficient Juice
A steady supply of vitamins
- Location
- The carbohydrates
Man, then you'd be okay with not seeing Unthinkable, because that thing is RoE combined with ZDT.
Sam Jackson plays a CIA dude 'enhanced interrogating' a Muslim convert who's stashed some nukes somewhere. It's... yeah, it exists. There's an entire catalogue of movies made on the idea that Colonel Jessup had a point.
FourthWall
Love & Destroy
- Location
- Chiraq
Just to go back to KotH for a minute, the reason it manages to be so human, I feel, is because Judge is from Bumfuck, Texas and so he is writing people he knows. He's not painting in broad strokes like Beavis & Butt-Head or the Goode Family, he's not even making a pastiche; he's letting people see his world with a humorous bent.
It's how it managed to be so far ahead of the curve and so timeless; it's real.
It's how it managed to be so far ahead of the curve and so timeless; it's real.
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teslashark
One of the brother site’s janitors
- Location
- Somewhere
The plot builds on one idea:
THE ANGRY MOB SHOT FIRST HONK HONK MOTHERFUCKER
Kokurokoki
"IDW DA NYA!"
- Location
- Area S09
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- Portland, OR
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Alright. I'm going to do it again. Today I'm going to review something pretty mainstream, something most of us have heard of. Today I'm going to review Red Dawn.
You don't exiiiiiist! Lalalalalalalalalala!
That's better.
'Murrica!
In the end, the heroes of the film die one by one. A few heroically, and some pointlessly. Their hatred of the Soviets drives them to ever greater extremes, as their circumstances slowly turn them into paranoid starving wrecks. At the end of the movie, only four of the group remain, two walk for the American lines, while the others attack a Soviet supply depot. The Colonel is busy writing a heartfelt poetic letter to his love back home when the attack comes, he rushes outside to find chaos. Although this scene is probably the least realistic of the film, the end is inevitable. The Colonel holds the two 'heroes' at gunpoint as they lay dying. Then puts his gun aside in disgust and lets them go. They stumble away to a park where they played together as children, and they die there. The closing shot is on a memorial to American partisans, built on the site where the group carved the names of their fallen friends into a rock, and at that point you realize that not only did most of them die pointlessly, but they died anonymously. Nobody will remember them, except as the dead of some amorphous group which fought bravely, and in vain, mostly never to know whether their efforts made any difference.
When I watch this film I can't see a glorification of America, exceptionalism, or really much of anything. There's very little glory to be found in Red Dawn. It is the story of the Soviet-Afghan War told in a setting that Americans can easily recognize and empathize with. Instead of it being a distant thing happening to strange people we know little about, it's the story of it happening in our backyard. Red Dawn is It Can't Happen Here: the invasion movie. A movie less about heroes, and more about the decay of morale, morality, and trust in war time. It's about the horrific pointlessness of war. Red Dawn is an incredibly bleak film, I don't honestly know how one could watch it and think it's about jingoism or exceptionalism, if anyone watches this movie and sees glory of any kind, I have to wonder how they define that. If watched as some sort of uber-conservative prophecy Red Dawn is fairly mediocre, but in my personal opinion, if watched as a film about the toll guerrilla warfare takes on people, it's a pretty incredible film without many peers.
You don't exiiiiiist! Lalalalalalalalalala!
That's better.
I feel that Red Dawn is unfairly maligned by many. I've seen people say it's about a lot of things. Jingoism, American exceptionalism, the fetishization of guns and violence. I'll be honest, after watching this film, I don't understand how we could have seen the same movie and have to come to such diametrically opposing conclusions. If I was to describe Red Dawn without actually using the words 'Soviet' 'invasion' or 'America,' it would actually be incredibly easy to do so. Red Dawn is a movie about a group of partisans fighting an occupying force, how the violence and brutality they are exposed to and use themselves turn them into something unrecognizable. It's a movie about what the paranoia, unremitting violence, and slow grind of fighting a guerrilla war against a vastly superior force do to people. And I feel there are quite a few moments over the course of this movie that hammer this message in.
Perhaps the first sign that this isn't going to be a nice happy heroic movie is when our heroes ambush a group of three Soviet soldiers as they take photos of themselves in front of a beautiful landscape, joke, tease each other, and otherwise act like... really pretty normal human beings. Within only a few minutes two of them are dead, and one of the main characters holds the last man -bleeding, terrified, in obvious agony- at gunpoint. The camera cuts away to the rest of the group and you hear a shot. Later on one of their number is captured by the Soviets and forced to swallow a tracking device, he goes back to the group leading a group of Spetznaz the entire way. The group triumphs again thanks to a well planned ambush, but they take a prisoner and discover their friend's reluctant treachery. First they execute their prisoner (after he mentions that they're breaking the Geneva conventions), and then the leader aims his weapon at the unwilling mole. Terrified he begs for his life, our hero lowers his gun and for a moment, it looks like things will be alright. And then another of them steps forward and guns the frightened boy down, showing not a hint of remorse as the dying boy stumbles forward and grabs onto him for support smearing him with blood. Earlier in the movie, this executioner made the first kill in his life, shooting a deer for dinner, he drinks the deer's blood and is told by the others that when one does one is changed forever. Pretentious symbolism? Maybe. But appropriate nonetheless.
Perhaps the first sign that this isn't going to be a nice happy heroic movie is when our heroes ambush a group of three Soviet soldiers as they take photos of themselves in front of a beautiful landscape, joke, tease each other, and otherwise act like... really pretty normal human beings. Within only a few minutes two of them are dead, and one of the main characters holds the last man -bleeding, terrified, in obvious agony- at gunpoint. The camera cuts away to the rest of the group and you hear a shot. Later on one of their number is captured by the Soviets and forced to swallow a tracking device, he goes back to the group leading a group of Spetznaz the entire way. The group triumphs again thanks to a well planned ambush, but they take a prisoner and discover their friend's reluctant treachery. First they execute their prisoner (after he mentions that they're breaking the Geneva conventions), and then the leader aims his weapon at the unwilling mole. Terrified he begs for his life, our hero lowers his gun and for a moment, it looks like things will be alright. And then another of them steps forward and guns the frightened boy down, showing not a hint of remorse as the dying boy stumbles forward and grabs onto him for support smearing him with blood. Earlier in the movie, this executioner made the first kill in his life, shooting a deer for dinner, he drinks the deer's blood and is told by the others that when one does one is changed forever. Pretentious symbolism? Maybe. But appropriate nonetheless.
'Murrica!
In the end, the heroes of the film die one by one. A few heroically, and some pointlessly. Their hatred of the Soviets drives them to ever greater extremes, as their circumstances slowly turn them into paranoid starving wrecks. At the end of the movie, only four of the group remain, two walk for the American lines, while the others attack a Soviet supply depot. The Colonel is busy writing a heartfelt poetic letter to his love back home when the attack comes, he rushes outside to find chaos. Although this scene is probably the least realistic of the film, the end is inevitable. The Colonel holds the two 'heroes' at gunpoint as they lay dying. Then puts his gun aside in disgust and lets them go. They stumble away to a park where they played together as children, and they die there. The closing shot is on a memorial to American partisans, built on the site where the group carved the names of their fallen friends into a rock, and at that point you realize that not only did most of them die pointlessly, but they died anonymously. Nobody will remember them, except as the dead of some amorphous group which fought bravely, and in vain, mostly never to know whether their efforts made any difference.
When I watch this film I can't see a glorification of America, exceptionalism, or really much of anything. There's very little glory to be found in Red Dawn. It is the story of the Soviet-Afghan War told in a setting that Americans can easily recognize and empathize with. Instead of it being a distant thing happening to strange people we know little about, it's the story of it happening in our backyard. Red Dawn is It Can't Happen Here: the invasion movie. A movie less about heroes, and more about the decay of morale, morality, and trust in war time. It's about the horrific pointlessness of war. Red Dawn is an incredibly bleak film, I don't honestly know how one could watch it and think it's about jingoism or exceptionalism, if anyone watches this movie and sees glory of any kind, I have to wonder how they define that. If watched as some sort of uber-conservative prophecy Red Dawn is fairly mediocre, but in my personal opinion, if watched as a film about the toll guerrilla warfare takes on people, it's a pretty incredible film without many peers.
FaeGlade Plural
Semper Legens
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Your analysis of the content of Red Dawn is pretty spot-on, it's on the list of movies I recommend to people because they're effective anti-war movies.
However, I AM careful when recommending it to some other people.
Why?
Because some people miss the entire message of the movie, just because of their patriotism. Because to them defending their country trumps all else, and what happens to the kids over the course of the movie just turns them into true patriots etc. To those people, it really contains all these pro-gun, pro-violence, pro-america messages.
Now that's barely the fault of the movie itself, if at all. A good chunk of those people probably react like that because the movie is set in the USA, but as you said that was also an effective way to convey it's actual message. But mostly, almost any anti-war movie can be entirely misunderstood by those people, and the answer is not to stop making anti-war movies.
Instead, it probably happened because the movies premise (soviet invasion of the USA) fed into pre-existing sentiments - from the miltia movement, hatred against the soviets, the enormous amout of US-american patriotism/nationalism. But again, you can't really blame the movie for all of those things.
As I said, similar things happen to pretty much every other war movie, Red Dawn is just more famous.
An example I like to use is Das Boot (another great anti-war movie) - when shown to test audiences, with some there was cheering at all the times where bad things happened to the protagonists. Why? Not because of any negative portrayal of the protagonists - but just because they were german, and the test audiences were not. Again, patriotism overtaking the message of a movie. And it also has modern-day nazis in Germany who actually see the movie as inspiring.
Incidentally, the writer of the novel the movie is based on called the movie too glorifying of war. Which it really isn't, but it's obviously easier to see that way once you put it on a big screen - that simply has that as an inherent effect, or at the very least makes it much easier to consume the product without taking in many of it's messages. Or rather, you can do that with a book too, but you're less likely to finish reading a book you don't think about.
The same applies to Red Dawn, I think. people who went in expecting a patriotic movie, with ideas about exceptional american heroism - well some of those people will have their notions changed by the movie, but others won't. And unfortunately, it's the reactions of those that are mostly talked about when we talk about Red Dawn.
However, I AM careful when recommending it to some other people.
Why?
Because some people miss the entire message of the movie, just because of their patriotism. Because to them defending their country trumps all else, and what happens to the kids over the course of the movie just turns them into true patriots etc. To those people, it really contains all these pro-gun, pro-violence, pro-america messages.
Now that's barely the fault of the movie itself, if at all. A good chunk of those people probably react like that because the movie is set in the USA, but as you said that was also an effective way to convey it's actual message. But mostly, almost any anti-war movie can be entirely misunderstood by those people, and the answer is not to stop making anti-war movies.
Instead, it probably happened because the movies premise (soviet invasion of the USA) fed into pre-existing sentiments - from the miltia movement, hatred against the soviets, the enormous amout of US-american patriotism/nationalism. But again, you can't really blame the movie for all of those things.
As I said, similar things happen to pretty much every other war movie, Red Dawn is just more famous.
An example I like to use is Das Boot (another great anti-war movie) - when shown to test audiences, with some there was cheering at all the times where bad things happened to the protagonists. Why? Not because of any negative portrayal of the protagonists - but just because they were german, and the test audiences were not. Again, patriotism overtaking the message of a movie. And it also has modern-day nazis in Germany who actually see the movie as inspiring.
Incidentally, the writer of the novel the movie is based on called the movie too glorifying of war. Which it really isn't, but it's obviously easier to see that way once you put it on a big screen - that simply has that as an inherent effect, or at the very least makes it much easier to consume the product without taking in many of it's messages. Or rather, you can do that with a book too, but you're less likely to finish reading a book you don't think about.
The same applies to Red Dawn, I think. people who went in expecting a patriotic movie, with ideas about exceptional american heroism - well some of those people will have their notions changed by the movie, but others won't. And unfortunately, it's the reactions of those that are mostly talked about when we talk about Red Dawn.
- Location
- Luton Airport
Sufficient Juice
A steady supply of vitamins
- Location
- The carbohydrates
For some people there is no such thing as an anti-war film; if it's got war, it's cool.
Jarhead is a great anti-war film which has zero war in it, and people complained that it is 'boring'. These people weren't missing the point, they got it right and then rejected it.
- Location
- National Capital Region, USA
I have to heartily agree. I always took Red Dawn as actually a pretty powerful anti-war movie, really. That yes, war can come, and you have to fight to protect your people, but you can't give yourself over to it, or war will consume you until there is nothing left.
At one point, the partisan group (who start the movie as high school students) rescue a downed Air Force Pilot, who provides some of the only information we get about the wider war... because the kids know nothing about what's going on outside their remote town since the war started. As Lieutenant Colonel Tanner (the AF pilot) gets to know the group, he sees one of the younger members carefully carving his kill count into the buttstock of his captured AK-47. The Lieutenant Colonel looks rather disturbed watching a 17 year old gleefully count up the number of Russians and Cubans he's killed, and tells the boy "All that hate's gonna burn you up inside, kid." The kid, who in the opening invasion saw his friends and classmates machinegunned by jumpy Russian paratroopers, and his father captured (while running after their fleeing truck, screaming for his son to 'Go! Just go!') and dragged off to a 'reeducation camp' that he did not survive just looks up at the Colonel with a creepy smile and says "Keeps me warm." Noting his concern, another guerilla asks him "Colonel... are we doing right?". The Lieutenant Colonel just shakes his head, unable to answer.
The Cuban officer DissMech mentioned in the last scene is in fact a long-service guerilla himself, and repeatedly tries to tell the Russians about the pointless, bloody futility of trying to crush a partisan movement with the tactics they're using (executing locals as hostages, killing anyone in the vicinity of ambushes, etc) since he was a guerilla for 20 years, and knows it doesn't work. He becomes increasingly disillusioned with his country's participation in the Russian invasion, since he has a lifetime of experience telling him that the freedom fighters win in the end, and that he himself has become the sort of man he spent his life fighting against. In the letter he's writing at the end, as the brothers begin their knowingly suicidal assault, he's telling his wife he's tired of war, and will submit his resignation.
When he rushes outside to see the already mortally wounded brothers stumbling by, he looks at them, looks at the gun in his hands, and disgustedly drops it into the snow, bidding the brothers 'vaya con Dios'. He's done with war.
The brothers, their partisan group already whittled down badly from casualties, betrayals, and a helicopter ambush, made their last attack on their hometown intending to die, hoping that their assault would just distract the Russians enough to let the last two other members of their band make it to American lines. When the others tell them to come with them, to escape, it goes like this:
And Matt just shrugs, like 'does it matter?' He's beyond caring anymore.
The last we see of the dying brothers is the pair of them sitting on a park bench where they went as kids, the last one alive talking about their father.
There's precious little glorification of war to be found here.
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BlackAeronaut
Scaring people witless since 1980
- Location
- A state of mind where it is always ****ing Monday.
This even gets lampshaded when the Air Force pilot mentions that the Russians used the same method they used on Afghanistan - military aircraft spoofing civilian transponders. (Although, lets NOT get into just how feasible this would be with the last dregs of the Cold War still simmering in the pot.)
- Location
- Portland, OR
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Yeah well, let's be honest, the invasion plan here just... doesn't work. But it's not really very important for the purposes of the film.
BlackAeronaut
Scaring people witless since 1980
- Location
- A state of mind where it is always ****ing Monday.
Indeed. Those that tend to hyperfocus on this are usually the sort that, as you said, miss the point of the film.
- Location
- Mons Regius
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Correction, it's DissMech.
Athene
Rise for the Shadow Queen
- Location
- Dream of The 90s
- Pronouns
- She/Her
So as some of you may be aware, Dissmech was attacked by someone near our apartment. She's physically fine, she's just in the recovery phase and things are a little rough for her.
I'm going to be doing some solo reviews to help deal with my feelings of guilt and powerlessness, because its an important element of a lot of fiction and because I feel it will help me. Sorry for the delay, things have just been really tough.
I'm going to be doing some solo reviews to help deal with my feelings of guilt and powerlessness, because its an important element of a lot of fiction and because I feel it will help me. Sorry for the delay, things have just been really tough.
Cyrus 21
Kamen Rider/Spirit of Chaos
- Location
- Canterlot
Take your time, you both need it. We can keep ourselves entertained while she gets better.