WAR and ANTI-WAR FILMS


Comedies Related to the Vietnam War:

In a lighter vein, Barry Levinson's Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) was centered on the irreverent, non-conformist, early morning disc-jockey Adrian Cronauer (Robin Williams) with his fast-talking mouth, heard on Armed Services Radio during the Vietnam conflict. An Airplane!-type satire on the cliches of Vietnam War films (notably Rambo, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and The Deer Hunter) was found in Jim Abrahams' political spoof sequel Hot Shots! Part Deux (1993), although it was set in Iraq and featured a mustached Mid-East dictator. Robert Zemeckis' Best Picture-winning sly comedy Forrest Gump (1994) followed its dumbed-down title character (Tom Hanks) through 1960s-1970s US history, including a tour to Vietnam and subsequent hero status, his meetings with Presidents, his romance with countercultural Jenny (Robin Wright), and his contact with Bubba (killed in Vietnam) and angry, legless platoon leader Lieutenant Dan (Gary Sinese).

Further Vietnam War-related Films:

Casualties of War - 1989John Irvin's realistic and disturbing view of the Vietnam struggle in Hamburger Hill (1987) marked a return to the conventional kind of WWII combat film (transposed to 1969 Vietnam) - it traced the brutal experiences of a group of GI infantrymen of the 101st Airborne Division from their initial training to their pointless deaths during a fierce, 10-day bloody battle for Ap Bia Mountain (Hamburger Hill). Patrick Sheane Duncan's documentary style film 84 Charlie Mopic (1989) provided a devastating, nightmarish tour of the horrors of Vietnam around 1969 in a filming mission by an army motion picture (MOPIC) cameraman on the front lines. Brian De Palma's thought-provoking Casualties of War (1989) told the true story (from a New Yorker article by Daniel Lang) of a decent Army private (Michael J. Fox) who refused to overlook his squadron's moral responsibility for the kidnap, sexual assault/gang rape, and murder of a native Vietnamese female.

Haunted Vietnam Vet Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins) saw visions of demons and monsters as reality slipped away from him in the transcendental Jacob's Ladder (1990). Joel Schumacher's Falling Down (1993) portrayed Michael Douglas as William Foster (with personalized license plate D-FENS) - a rattled, confrontational, unemployed defense worker in the jungles of Los Angeles' Establishment society who snapped during a difficult morning commute, and while trying to order breakfast after 11:30 am in a Whammyburger fast food restaurant; and later, the director's gritty Tigerland (2000) depicted Advanced Infantry Training in 1971 at a boot camp in Louisiana for Vietnam-bound recruits called Fort Polk, infamously known as Tigerland since it simulated a SE Asian jungle - it portrayed the brutalization of the young trainees, including a stubborn, rebellious Texan named Bozz (Colin Farrell).

Randall Wallace's factual tribute film We Were Soldiers (2002), starring Mel Gibson (and the makers of Braveheart), chronicled the US' first major bloody, heroic engagement (part of the Pleiku Campaign) between the First Battalion, Seventh Cavalry and the N. Vietnamese in late 1965. (Gibson also starred in Roland Emmerich's melodramatic The Patriot (2000), a tale of Revolutionary War revenge.) Phillip Noyce's remake of Joseph L. Mankiewicz's earlier 1952 effort was a faithful adaptation of Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American (2002), set in Saigon in the early 50s - it criticized US involvement in Vietnam by depicting a montage of images of the decades-long war at its conclusion.

Heroic War Films:

There has been the tendency to modify the war-historical events in order to fit the story into the Hollywood mold of war films to tell a story of heroic courage, or to praise Americanism under fire, etc., and make a commercially-viable film. Two such examples included Sidney Furie's hostage-rescue action thriller Iron Eagle (1985), and Tony Scott's slick blockbuster about Navy fighter pilots Top Gun (1986), starring Tom Cruise. The three-handkerchief 'soap opera' An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) told a touching story of romance in a military setting.Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor (2001) highlighted a love triangle amidst the backdrop of a realistic, special effects-heavy attack on the Hawaiian Pearl Harbor base.

More realistically, director-writer Samuel Fuller's The Big Red One (1980) captured the terror of ill-advised combat in a semi-autobiographical account of a foot-soldier's squadron in the US Army's First Infantry Division (its insignia was dubbed 'The Big Red One') and its intrepid sergeant (played by Lee Marvin) during WWII. It followed their progress from North Africa through Sicily, Omaha Beach and Belgium to the ultimate horror of the concentration camp at Falkenau, Czechoslovakia. Director Peter Weir's heart-wrenching Australian film Gallipoli (1981) was set during WWI - a rich character study of two idealistic best friends in the Australian army (one of whom was a young Mel Gibson in a star-making role) who would vainly fight the German-allied Turks at Gallipoli in 1915.

The lost battle in Vietnam was refought in various Hollywood films, such as the adventure film Uncommon Valor (1983) which featured Gene Hackman as a retired Marine Colonel and frustrated father who took matters into his own hands to find his MIA son - he brought together the remaining members of his son's Vietnam platoon for an attempted, daring POW rescue - and re-enactment of the war. Actor-producer-director Clint Eastwood's Heartbreak Ridge (1986) depicted an aging, grizzled Marine gunnery sergeant named Tom Highway (Eastwood himself) whose days in the military were numbered, but redeemed with one final chance to train a green, rag-tag platoon with old-fashioned discipline in order to invade and be victorious over the tiny island of Grenada in 1983. And John Milius' Red Dawn (1984) depicted the invasion of the United States by Russian and Cuban paratroopers, and the country's defense provided guerrilla warfare-style by Midwestern, teenaged high school students (Charlie Sheen, Jennifer Grey, Lea Thompson, and Patrick Swayze).

Three War Film Best Picture Nominees in 1998:

Saving Private Ryan - 1998In 1998 alone, there were three highly popular WWII films, all nominated for Best Picture (but Shakespeare in Love (1998) took the top prize). Writer/director Terrence Malick demonstrated his film-making talent (after an absence of 25 years) with an ethereal re-make of the 1964 film of James Jones' novel about the WWII attack on the strategic island of Guadalcanal - The Thin Red Line (1998). [The film was actually a remake of director Andrew Marton's under-rated The Thin Red Line (1964) with Keir Dullea.] And Steven Spielberg won as Best Director for his monumental recreation of the gory D-Day assault that opened Saving Private Ryan (1998) - a realistic drama about eight WWII soldiers sent into enemy territory to rescue the sole surviving son of a family. The third film was Italian film-maker Roberto Benigni's bittersweet Holocaust fable Life is Beautiful (1998), the Best Foreign Language film of the year.

American Civil War Films:

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, two realistic Civil War films were released:

Later in the decade, director Ang Lee's war drama Ride With the Devil (1999) told about two Southern friends fighting guerrilla-style and side-by-side on the Kansas-Missouri border (with singer Jewel in her acting debut).

Spy/Espionage War-Related Films:

Most of the secret agent James Bond action films, beginning with Dr. No (1962), owe their origins to world-dominating tyrants, the Cold War and the Red Menace. Even after the Cold War ended and the agonizing post-Vietnam War period was over, Hollywood produced a number of high-tech, spectacular action-hero films with war-time suspense and superpower conflicts and thrills. These suspenseful spy and espionage films were filled with situations of military and political strife, CIA intrigue, terrorism, submarines, and nuclear warfare, etc. The following were representative examples of these political thrillers:

Schindler's List - 1993Holocaust Films:

Steven Spielberg's award-winning epic Schindler's List (1993) presented the devastating story of the Holocaust through the actions of womanizing German industrialist/war profiteer Oscar Schindler (Liam Neeson) who saved a thousand Jewish lives. Spielberg also explored the Holocaust in his documentary project The Last Days (1999) that brought together the stories of five survivors. And exiled Best Director Roman Polanski's The Pianist (2002), with a Best Actor Oscar for lead actor Adrien Brody, was the harrowing story of survival for Jewish musician Wladyslaw Szpilman during the Holocaust.

War - The Ultimate 'Reality TV':

1991's Gulf War military action as Operation Desert Storm was first examined in Courage Under Fire (1996), and then in director David O. Russell's absurdist Three Kings (1999) with George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg. Jean-Jacques Annaud's Enemy at the Gates (2001) went back in history to tell the factual account of the 1942-1943 battle of Stalingrad, a major turning point in WWII. But director John Moore's pro-military action adventure Behind Enemy Lines (2001) with Gene Hackman was set amidst the backdrop of the recent Balkan-Bosnian struggle. Ridley Scott's suspenseful Black Hawk Down (2001) recreated the bloody events surrounding the tragic October, 1993 American ground-force siege of the war-torn Somalian city of Mogadishu. John Woo's Windtalkers (2002) dramatized how a battle-weary, WWII Marine (Nicolas Cage) guarded and befriended a Navajo soldier with code-talking secrets.

The 'Second' Gulf War (Operation Iraqui Freedom) may soon be the source of future Hollywood interpretations, but it appears that American audiences do not want realistic war dramas -- war is the ultimate 'reality TV' -- during actual wartime. Collateral Damage (2002), an Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, about a Los Angeles firefighter seeking revenge for a terrorist bombing (a drug-related, non-Middle Eastern attack), was postponed and delayed in release following the September 11th tragedy, and still did poorly at the box-office.

And as often happens, war (or politically-oriented or anti-war) films with ties to current 'headline' events go into a period of declining popularity, especially when the country is actually fighting a long and drawn-out war. Director Gavin Hood's Rendition (2007), a dramatic thriller and human rights drama about the war on terror attained through keeping terrorist-suspect prisoners in detention facilities outside the US where they could be tortured, starred Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhall - but it barely made $10 million. Also, writer/director Paul Haggis' somber, lifeless and plodding In the Valley of Elah (2007) with Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron, was set against the backdrop of the war in Iraq, but made only $7 million at the box-office. The star-studded, exhaustively-talkative, and opinionated $35 million dollar Lions for Lambs (2007) with major actors Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep and director/star Robert Redford, chastised the mistaken Bush administration for leading the country into a futile war, but was poorly attended and fell flat. Scriptwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan's first screenplay was for Peter Berg's equally-failed anti-war Middle-Eastern thriller The Kingdom (2007) about a terrorist bombing in Sauda Arabia, an expensive $80 million film that couldn't recoup its costs. However, writer/director Charles Ferguson's low-budget documentary No End in Sight (2007), an informational accounting of the bungling of the Bush administration in the Iraq War, was a well-received factual indictment of failed US foreign policy in regards to Iraq.

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