Caltrops - Peter Molyneux's The Movies





	[quote name="Lizard_King"]This movie seems to have carefully combined limited release status with the average critic's lack of war experience in order to be very appealing to a lot of people. I'm not just referring to Qt3, here, but also to reviewers and friends of mine who insisted that I simply MUST see this film. It is visually impressive and has a number of well crafted moments, as wrom might say, but it lacks any sort of coherence to tie it all together. Why? -Because it's billed by its fans and (with a lighter touch) by its makers as realistic. That should fall apart for most people during the sniper sequence that was clearly imported from a movie where the main characters were, you know, snipers. And by the time Renner decides it's time to make this film Death Wish by carjacking Iraqis, followed by the wholly unnecessary 3 man clearing of an entire Iraqi neighborhood (LET'S SPLIT UP THAT'S A GREAT IDEA THAT REALLY RESOLVES THE CORE TACTICAL ISSUES HERE), well, I don't know what to say if that seems plausible. -Because half of it is a moderately competent Speed-like bomb escalation movie, and the other half a terrible action movie. So it's not even going to stick to doing one thing poorly, it's got to multitask. -The above invalidates its value as a character study. Why? Because someone in that situation may act that way, I certainly don't know. And maybe we can just pretend that the countless disciplinary proceedings that should have followed each and every one of their missions were simply cut out of the film for the sake of brevity. But you are left with two choices for the motivations of the filmmaker and scriptwriter (also the guy from Valley of Elah): either they are not interested in being realistic and simply shoehorned an action movie into a current setting, or they were trying to be realistic and were simply incompetent about it. Either choice makes it very difficult to take the characters seriously, as no matter what they are just some scriptwriter's wet dream. That's a shame, as I think there's a lot of good material there. For instance, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/31/us/31war.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1">one</a> of the two team leaders in my squad in my first deployment was crippled in an IED blast, losing a good part of his hip, ass, and thigh. In his early 20's and crippled with horrible pain, he became dependent on the drugs the military gave him but disliked being so detached from reality. He fell back on old habits and decided that marijuana provided him with manageable pain and the ability to function. The military was a hair away from classifying him as a junkie and disqualifying him from his benefits, so in a fit of his regularly recurring cycles of depression (largely caused by being unable to connect with anyone around him) he drove away (in the midst of a Call of Duty 4 session, no less) and crawled into an underground drainage pipe and starved to death. I doubt his family would want that made into a movie, but who knows. The point is there are real stories that any veteran could have connected them to of people who have struggled with the consequences of their military service, and that grounding would have given them a lot more credibility than what they actually did, which was pull the whole thing out of their collective ass. So maybe there's more to the Creexul breath of fresh air, and there's no point to trying to convince someone that they didn't enjoy something when clearly they did. But maybe there's room to reevaluate what it is that is so appealing to so many. [/quote]