Future of War Movies...
- Thread starter Yevetha
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If you mean "what is the future of the war movie" and not "let's talk about movies about futuristic war," you're in the wrong forum.
If the topic is the former, OBL's very timely demise was a popular event, and will soon be a major motion picture.
If the topic is the former, OBL's very timely demise was a popular event, and will soon be a major motion picture.
I'm still waiting for a good NATO v. Warsaw Pact film.
Corporate Warfare - Either industrial espionage or sabotage leading to conflict between corporations, competing military contractors in-country fighting each other, or military contractors vs. conventional military.
Gaming Culture Mixing With Warfare - Taking the frequent commentary on the video-game-like nature of modern war fought at a distance to its logical extent, have naive top gamers fresh out of school recruited to operate drones and robots having to come to grips with the reality of the destruction they've wrought and the lives they've taken once they finally see it up close and personal.
Electronic Warfare - War fought entirely in cyberspace over control of information or sabotage of enemy systems.
The Ultimate Expendable Soldiers - What happens when politicians and military leaders no longer have to deal with a populace weary of seeing their young men and women come home dead or wounded because they've found soldiers the vast majority of people have no relation to or care for, such as clones, robots, or so forth? Doesn't this make war that much more easy to justify and prolong in their eyes and therefore more prevalent?
Resource And Environmental War - Battles over dwindling fossil fuels, climate-related disasters causing famine and flooding and refugee displacement, warfare between the have and the have nots. Nothing new in and of itself, but drawing on more modern issues like Climate Change and dwindling oil reserves in the Middle East.
Solar System Neo-Colonialism - A new wave of colonialism spreads amongst the moons, planets, and planetoids of the solar system, with subsequent independence movements on those worlds when they feel exploited.
Alternate Timeline War Stories - If all the good "bad guys" are gone, simply tell the story from the perspective of a world where they aren't.
Granted, but milking a war for films isn't the same as being propagandistic.
Hell, there's a fair number of 1920s/1930s films about World War I, and they're pretty negative. (Thinking mostly of Four Horseman of the Apocalypse and All Quiet on the Western Front). The unpopularity of World War I was even used for explicit propaganda purposes, in Russian films celebrating the Russian Revolution.
And then there's say, Vietnam. I don't think I'm raising any eyebrows if I suggest that there have been a number of films about Vietnam, and some of them portray the war in less than propagandistic terms - Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket and so on.
Finally, today's wars... are already pretty popular in movies. At least in the sense there's been more then a few Iraq war movies already - most notably the Oscar-winning Hurt Locker, although I've also seen In the Valley of Elah - even if so far as I know none of these movies have done well financially.
I guess the difference here is these are pretty critical films about an ongoing war, which is peculiar. Making war films during a war isn't that uncommon - both World Wars had a spate of them - but they tend to be very propagandistic. This is also true of the one American film made during Vietnam, The Green Berets.
Films critical of the said wars, like the World War I movies and Vietnam flicks I've mentioned, tend to have been made after those wars were safely over. Films critical of America's current wars are being made long before those wars are over, although the succesful one I noted - Hurt Locker - is something I felt had an ambiguous, largely apolitical tone.
I wouldn't be surprised if we see more films about America's current and future wars, and obviously, World War II has continued to be a popular film setting and I don't see that ending any time soon. Beyond that, who knows - sure, there could be a great, say, Napoelonic War movie in the offing, but I don't think we'd get a slew of them.
Now, as to the future of sci-fi war movies?
I'd like to see The Forever War as a film.
I'd buy two tickets to see a movie about the retreat from Russia and the Battle of Nations.
Downfall did pretty well, so I imagine you could make a good movie about the end of the end at Fontainebleu too.
Downfall did pretty well, so I imagine you could make a good movie about the end of the end at Fontainebleu too.
I wish there'd be more movies in the vein of the movies based on the Cornelius Ryan novels, aka A Bridge too far, The Longest Day, The Last Battle. These movies are told from both sides and have a sense of scale that modern war movies just don't have these days. They're all one-sided.
Enemy at the Gates? Underrated flick.
(Of course, then you have something like the far more successful Black Hawk Down, where they might as well be mowing down zombies who figured out how to operate Kalashnikovs.)
I loved hurtlocker this will be great if will be anything like that or blackhawk down.
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Tom Clancy's novel Red Storm Rising would be a perfect alternate-history period piece miniseries for HBO or somesuch.
I just wanna see Abramses and T-80s get blown up real good. I think we need at least $200 million.
Hell, you know what would be just as good? Kursk. Call the film The Wall of Prokhorovka, it's about 1200 tanks slamming into each other on the Russian plain. It doesn't even have to be on the moon, it'll gross a billion dollars.
That's not unique to the Allies, though. There are plenty of films that tell the story from the other side.
The thing is are you making an action film, or an historical film? If it's an action film, you need the audience to side with your heroes. So it violates tone and potentially sets your audience against the heroes if you take too much time to create sympathy for the villains/enemy. The James Bond films have actually been guilty of this a few times - the only times that Bond has killed someone in which I've actually been negative towards Bond doing so have been those films in which we're given time to get to know the villains.
When it comes to being historical films, on the other hand - there's plenty of scope for telling both sides. "Tora Tora Tora" comes to mind right away, as does the two Clint Eastwood films that looked at Iwo Jima from both the Japanese and American point of view (Flags of Our Fathers/Letters from Iwo Jima). The existence of those two films alone rather contradicts the idea that all modern war films are "all one-sided". You could also include the recent House of Saddam mini-series which was all from Saddam Hussein's perspective. And I'm willing to bet someone will do an OBL biographical film - possibly even a sympathetic one, and wait for the sparks to fly on that - before long.
Alex
Wait, really?
I mean I'm criminally out of touch with humanity at large, but people don't think Austerlitz and the Pyramids? Hell, Napoleon in Egypt alone is a ready-made movie, I think.
However, the fame of Napoleon himself can trump the fame of any given battle as far as production is concerned. I'm thinking of Abel Gance's silent film Napoleon here, which doesn't go past 1797 - it's all young Napoleon fear.
To be cute, isn't that really two one-sided films?
I'd add Joyeux Noel as an example of a recent war film that shows both sides of the conflict.
There are, of course, German and Japanese films that show World War II from a German and/or Japanese perspective (Downfall, The Burmese Harp, etc.) for what that is worth.
I'd be interested as far as modern war is concerned to see more Middle Eastern films about the American wars in that region, and I'm sure we'll get those as well. Probably more nuanced films then what I hear Valley of the Wolves Iraq is reputed to be.
Not that keen on it. I just prefer Russian movies about that front, really.
Although I did really like The Sun, if anyone ever wanted to see an equivalent bunker-mentality film only for Hirohito rather than Hitler.
Historical war flicks and sci-fi war films will keep getting made whenever a studio or director gets a solid idea they like.
As to films about present day wars. They have all been box office bombs because Hollywood hasn't found a single good story to tell and because counter-insurgency warfare is inherently boring(and I say that as a veteran of such warfare in Diyala and Ninewah provinces) from a movie audience's point of view.
The Hurt Locker is the best of the lot so far(it also had the smallest box office gross of any Best Picture winner to date), but even that movie paints a ridiculously inaccurate picture of what it is really like over there. It also suffers from having a weak and highly episodic plot that really drags in places.
But next year Hollywood is going to rediscover the "Rah-rah" gung-ho style of war movies, first with a couple of OBL movies and then with Peter Berg's 'Lone Survivor' adaptation. And those films will be far more popular than anything Hollywood has put out about Iraq and Afghanistan so far.
As to films about present day wars. They have all been box office bombs because Hollywood hasn't found a single good story to tell and because counter-insurgency warfare is inherently boring(and I say that as a veteran of such warfare in Diyala and Ninewah provinces) from a movie audience's point of view.
The Hurt Locker is the best of the lot so far(it also had the smallest box office gross of any Best Picture winner to date), but even that movie paints a ridiculously inaccurate picture of what it is really like over there. It also suffers from having a weak and highly episodic plot that really drags in places.
But next year Hollywood is going to rediscover the "Rah-rah" gung-ho style of war movies, first with a couple of OBL movies and then with Peter Berg's 'Lone Survivor' adaptation. And those films will be far more popular than anything Hollywood has put out about Iraq and Afghanistan so far.
I don't see why that should at all be the case. The Hurt Locker was very compelling and I wasn't the least bit bored. If 24 can make counter-terrorism exciting, why would counter-insurgency be any different?
How is it inaccurate? (Not that I think this is any kind of obstacle to a movie's success; Hollywood doesn't do accuracy very well.
) At the risk of being too political about this, Hollywood liberals are uncomfortable with making the American soldier the (relatively) uncomplicated hero of contemporary war films. He doesn't have to be John Wayne - he can be a bit of a headcase, like the guy in The Hurt Locker - but he's gotta do heroic stuff, not mope around making us feel sorry for him. (The Hurt Locker guy was probably going too far with the headcase angle, and it's no surprise that that movie wasn't a BO smash.)
People don't go to see war films to be depressed. They don't go to any films to be depressed. War films need to have the same crowd-pleasing qualities as Iron Man or Thor - you can't forget that you are in the entertainment biz. Hollywood won't make a successful contemporary war film until they realize that their own political views are what's holding them back.
That's interesting; I've been wondering how long it would take for Hollywood's greed to overcome their liberal scruples. I'm astonished it's taken this long.
The problem with Iraq and Afghanistan from a movie's point of view, is that we dominate the battlefield too much. There are no outposts getting wiped out ala Vietnam and very few major engagements. The badguys can snipe at us, mortar us, and plant IEDs to ambush us. That is it. If they show themselves they get killed within seconds. War movies, at least in the classic sense, need a strong enemy who can at least put up a challenge to our heroes. Our current wars lack that for the most part.
Lone Survivor(a true story btw) gets around this by having four Navy SEALs get trapped on a mountain with hundreds of Taliban fighters, and without the ability to call in Air or Arty. Which is why I think it will be a commercial success, unlike say Lions for Lambs, it can be marketed as a straight up war/action movie.
As to the Hurt Locker's inaccuracies there are tons of them, but most of them are just the nitpicks that all professions do when they see themselves depicted onscreen.
Two of them are more major however, and I think general audiences can pick-up on them without ever having served. The first is that EOD(Our three main characters) is a rare and treasured resource, they do not leave the FOB without at least three gun-trucks escorting them(I escorted EOD outside the wire dozens of times, and had them refuse to leave when we only could provide two trucks for escort). All the scenes of our EOD crew out alone, without escort of any sort are just ridiculous(Don't even get me started about the end of the movie where Renner's character goes out by himself).
Second, soldiers are constantly checking on each other, making sure everyone has their head on right. You don't let people who are messed up emotionally play with automatic weapons and explosives. Renner's character would have been relieved of duty and placed under psych watch after the first bout of instability. His own soldiers would have turned him in.
And I think audiences figured those two things out as the movie went along, and for a movie that was trying to portray itself as entirely realistic, it really hurt it.
Lone Survivor(a true story btw) gets around this by having four Navy SEALs get trapped on a mountain with hundreds of Taliban fighters, and without the ability to call in Air or Arty. Which is why I think it will be a commercial success, unlike say Lions for Lambs, it can be marketed as a straight up war/action movie.
As to the Hurt Locker's inaccuracies there are tons of them, but most of them are just the nitpicks that all professions do when they see themselves depicted onscreen.
Two of them are more major however, and I think general audiences can pick-up on them without ever having served. The first is that EOD(Our three main characters) is a rare and treasured resource, they do not leave the FOB without at least three gun-trucks escorting them(I escorted EOD outside the wire dozens of times, and had them refuse to leave when we only could provide two trucks for escort). All the scenes of our EOD crew out alone, without escort of any sort are just ridiculous(Don't even get me started about the end of the movie where Renner's character goes out by himself).
Second, soldiers are constantly checking on each other, making sure everyone has their head on right. You don't let people who are messed up emotionally play with automatic weapons and explosives. Renner's character would have been relieved of duty and placed under psych watch after the first bout of instability. His own soldiers would have turned him in.
And I think audiences figured those two things out as the movie went along, and for a movie that was trying to portray itself as entirely realistic, it really hurt it.
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