Category Archives: war

Crimson Tide

Posted on September 7, 2006

Back before Islamic terrorists and drug lords became the standard Hollywood villains, Russians were the go to bad guys. Even after the Soviet Union fell apart they were “the source of troubles.” So in 1995 (or, probably more accurately given studio approval and production schedules, 1993) renegade Russian nationalists were an excellent choice to set off a nuclear conflagration.

Crimson Tide follows the crew of an American nuclear sub on what they thought was a reasonably normal patrol assignment only to have the aforementioned Russian baddies attempt a coup and capture a missile and sub base about ten days in. The American Navy of course has well-established principles for controlling the launch of missiles on our subs; at the time of this (fictional) incident the Captain and his XO had to agree that the received orders were authentic. If the two didn’t agree the missiles weren’t launched.

In Michael Schiffer‘s screenplay, the Executive Action Message with final instructions is cut off, and the USS Alabama’s Captain (Gene Hackman) and First Officer (Denzel Washington) disagree that the missiles should be launched anyway (an earlier EAM did call for this). And this is the pair’s first mission together. Uh oh!

Both men attempt to take control of the sub through regulation, force and rhetoric. Complicating matters, a Russian sub is in the same stretch of ocean and tears off the Alabama’s radio antenna so they must surface to receive the update orders.

Frankly, its hard to think of two actors at the time better suited to face off against each other, both strong but the strengths coming from rigidly contrasting aspects. White v. black is the most obvious, superficial difference but Washington is education, smooth, the Modern Navy Man while Hackman is grizzled, up from the engine room, the stereotypical hard-ass but lovable skipper.

Tide also is smack in director Tony Scott’s wheelhouse: big budget action but forced within strict boundaries; almost the entire movie, except the prologue, a few TV clips and the epilogue, happens inside the submarine and surounding waters. Other Scott films I’d put up as fitting in his sweet spot are Enemy of the State (another Hackman flick, with Will Smith taking the Denzel/partner role, that I meant to write up), Top Gun and Spy Game. When he tries to make movies that sprawl, literally or figuratively, they just don’t turn out as well: Days of Thunder (he and Cruise attempt to do for auto racing what Top Gun did for Navy jets, blah), Domino, and especially the horrid Man on Fire (Scott and Washington’s second collaboration).

recommended

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Red Dawn

Posted on July 23, 2006

Made in the last years of the Evil Empire, I noticed Red Dawn on a movie channel and wanted to see how well it held up 22 years later. The story is basic Cold War stuff, turned on its head. The Soviets, with a force lead by their Cuban and Nicaraguan allies, invade but all we really see is what happens in one small piece, a small town in the Nebraska plains. Few nukes, it turns out, were needed to take America down.

As an airborne unit lands one September day, a few kids break loose and head into the mountains; fortunately two of them, brothers played by Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen, had a dad (the laconic Harry Dean Stanton) who taught them to hunt and camp, to be real redblooded American men.

Swayze keeps them hidden and safe for the first month but then they head into town to find out what’s happening. The boys find Stanton and a few dozen other potential troublemakers hearded into a re-education camp and themselves atop the most wanted list. Time to do something!

The boys start small, picking off occupying soldiers when they travel in small numbers outside town. After picking up two granddaughters of a family friend (Leah Thomspon and a barely recognizable Jennifer Grey), they get busy with the help of weaponry taken off the dead. It goes on from there.

This is a couple of years, by the way, before Grey teamed up with Swayze in Dirty Dancing or Sheen in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. While she was the love interest of both in those movies, and despite the difficult, isolated lifestyle they endure together, nobody hooks up here.

Directed by Apocalypse Now scribe and all-around tough guy John Milius and co-written by Milius and Kevin Reynolds, Red Dawn is the nightmare side of our struggle with the Communist bloc. The complacency and arrogance of our political leaders is what could lead to this result.

But Milius is guilty of some serious laziness himself, or perhaps the blame belongs to the budding Brat Pack cast (C. Thomas Howell is in the gang too, and of course gets to do his anguished shtick), but someone needs to tell me how these kids’ hair is always clean and neatly trimmed, their clothes reasonably fresh rather than in tatters and how the boys don’t have at least scraggly beards. My hair would be a greasy, tangled–and long–mess after months in the hills!

modestly recommended

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The Bridge on the River Kwai

Posted on June 20, 2006

David Lean’s 1957 prison camp classic The Bridge on the River Kwai has always been a favorite of mine compared with many other World War II movies because instead of having many shots of flying planes or tanks it focuses on mental combat and the response of men to terribly difficult circumstances.

Alec Guinness stars as the ranking officer of group of British soldiers captured by the Japanese and marched to a camp deep in the jungles of south Asia. Sessue Hayakawa is the camp commandant, unhappy to start with at this non-combat assignment, and unwilling to brook the least dissent from his charges.

The Brits, though, are equally unwilling to lose that stiff upper lip and when Hayakawa orders the officers to work alongside their men in building a bridge (over the Kwai River, natch) in contravention of Geneva Convention rules the officers take blistering punishment rather than comply. Falling further behind schedule the Japanese has no choice but to find a face-saving excuse to cave in. The Englishmen take the project in hand and deliver as required.

Meanwhile William Holden, already a prisoner when the others arrive, escapes and, with the help of natives who hate the Japanese as much as him, makes his way to an Allied base. The officers there are aware of the Japanese’ train plans and use a bit of armtwisting to get Holden to lead a team back to the camp so the construction can be blown up. The final conflict, of course, is between Holden and Guinness.

Based on a novel by Pierre Boulle (yes, he also wrote the novel from which Planet of the Apes was made), this was the first of three incredible historical epics director David Lean made: Bridge was followed in 1962 by Lawrence of Arabia and in ’65 by Doctor Zhivago. Some run, eh?

highly recommended

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The Great Escape

Posted on January 22, 2006

This John Sturges classic is over 40 years old now and while the production values (e.g., lack of big explosions and long sad pull shots) show it, there are only a handful of war movies which come close to it for overall impact. The Great Escape is a big sprawling story and has lots of recognizable stars, many of them young and who used this as a launch pad.

By the early ’60s most Americans had transitioned to seeing Germany as our ally against the Soviet Union and so for the most part the enemy characters are not villainous or evil, more committed to their cause and victory. Stalag 17, produced a decade earlier, is a decent comparison for the change in portrayal of Nazis.

Plot basics: Late in WWII the Nazis decide to bring together in a single, heavily guarded and secured place the Allied prisoners who’ve been the most persistent in escaping from other camps. Not necessarily the best strategy though because these prisoners have been tasked with allowing themselves to be recaptured after escapes to draw resources inside the homeland and putting all of them together means they have all the specialists required to break out even from the purpose-built stockade. This time, though, the Allied soldiers intend to make their departure from hospitality permanent.

There are so many good performances in this movie. Standouts for me include: Steve McQueen, Richard Attenborough, James Garner, Donald Pleasance. Hannes Messemer (the camp commandant), James Donald, and Harry Riebauer (no doubt the model for Sgt. Schulze on Hogan’s Heroes). Also getting important early exposure are James Coburn, Charles Bronson, David McCallum and Gordon Jackson. The interplay between Garner and Pleasance during their part of the escape is particularly touching and human and not expected in a war flick.

The screenplay, full of smart dialogue, was written by Hollywood veteran W.R. Burnett (Edward G. Robinson starrer Little Caeser, noir classic This Gun for Hire, and multi-Oscar nominee The Asphalt Jungle) and James Clavell from Paul Brickhill’s book. Clavell covered similar territory in his terrific novel King Rat, the movie version of which gave George Segal one of his first major parts, before gaining fame from his novels Shogun and Tai-Pan. Surpise for me looking at Clavell’s IMDB listing is that he also wrote the screenplay of English racial tension drama To Sir, With Love.

highly recommended

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Troy

Posted on July 2, 2005

Is there a story more famous than the war over the most beautiful woman of the ancient world? The tale of the face that launched a thousand ships aiming to reclaim her for the king of Sparta, though, is spun far off its traditional rails by director Wolfgang Petersen (The Perfect Storm, Enemy Mine) and writer David Benioff (25th Hour) into a thinly veiled contemporary psychodrama.

Focused mainly on Achilles (Brad Pitt) and Hector (Eric Bana), the two great warriors of ancient Greece, Troy sets them against each other as reluctant fighters unmoved by the ideals passed down by Homer in The Iliad. Excellent Hollywood mirrors: Achilles hones his martial prowess as his answer to the ephemeral nature of life while Hector looks to his wife and infant son for sustenance.

Achilles laughs at the allegiance demanded by King Agamemnon (a mulletted Brian Cox) and scorns the honor price demanded by Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus, Helen’s spurned husband. Hector finds strength in leading Troy’s army and peace in accepting the human frailty of his brother Paris (Orlando Bloom). When Paris cannot face death at Menelaus’ sword Hector lifts him up lovingly yet asks no quarter later when he walks out the city gates to his deathmatch. Achilles must receive Hector’s gift to reconcile this inner battle and conquer his angst.

Peter O’Toole’s Priam is well beyond an active place on the battlefield, more suited to skulking unnoticed and favoring priestly advice over the words of his sons. The gods, of course, sit on Mount Olympus seeking entertainment rather than heeding the signals priests read from birds and pigs. Hence the tragic ending to the story. Sean Bean gets a role very different from LotR’s Boromir, the political animal Odysseus (no, no mention of his ride home) who connects Agamemnon’s leadership to Achilles’ blade.

Helen’s played here by Diane Kruger, lovely enough but little more than that. She’s easily outperformed by Rose Byrne as Briseis, the Trojan princess who wins Achilles’ heart, and Saffron Burrows as Hector’s wife Andromache. I may be biased–both are more attractive in my eyes–but they seem more at ease with the dialog and direction.

Petersen and Benioff are the real villains of the piece. While no one would greenlight a 1950s Cecil DeMille bland, smooth costume epic these days, the pendulum’s swung too far the other way. Between computers, high def cameras and access to suitable locations anywhere, filmmakers can deliver stunning visuals and any angles on the action desired but this need to explore every major character’s psychological landscape crowds every movie into the same narrow space:

Troy != Gladiator != Kingdom of Heaven != Braveheart != Cold Mountain != Saving Private Ryan != Minority Report.

Fortunately they haven’t ruined this movie and though it could have been better I still can say:

recommended

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Battle of Algiers, The (La Battaglia di Algeri)

Posted on March 20, 2005

Had been recommended this 1965 French movie some time ago in a long and windy AskMefi discussion of classic, forgotten non-English language films and put it in the request queue at the Mountain View Public Library since, fortunately for me, they own a copy. Took a couple of months, guess we have quite the artsy crowd here in town. TS1 brought it home the other day and it turned out to have three discs! So I threw disc one in the player early afternoon wondering how long all of it would take but only 117 minutes for the movie itself, the other two discs are bonus features and related documentaries from The Criterion Collection.

The Battle of Algiers is first and foremost a political film, sort of a docudrama, made only a couple of years after the final events of the struggle it captures. Shot in black and white, little concern for plot coherence, very much about characters; the dialog is in French and Arabic so I had to read the subtitles. The battle is the post-WWII fight between the FLN, Algerian freedom fighters, and the French colonial government in the city of Algiers from 1952 to 1960 but mainly 1954-57 and a voiceover aftermath explaining that independence was finally achieved in 1962.

I’m not familiar with this period of French history, before my time and got wiped away by the Vietnam War, but seems to have been one of the two key conflicts that shaped modern French politics along with their defeat and withdrawal from Viet Nam. Wikipedia has a useful entry on the film and some of the individuals involved.

Director/co-writer Gillo Pontecorvo, working in Rome and Algiers, does a frankly amazing job. Completely ignoring conventional filmmaking and using only one professional actor (Jean Martin as Col. Mathieu, commander of the local French military), Pontecorvo must have had to walk an emotional tightrope filming the crowd scenes. I wonder if there were moments when the recreated riots almost turned into real ones and how many of the people in the crowds were present at the original events.

The film jumps in time every few scenes. The narrator is the only channel holding things together, there is no protagonist or antagonist though the Algerians a given the positive framing and the French negative but not unmixed. Both sides are shown committing abominable acts of violence against civilians. Main characters are composites of real people or just have the name changed. Very powerful emotional impact by the end.

recommended

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Matrix Revolutions

Posted on February 6, 2005

Not being at all interested in the unending blah blah blah of the Super Bowl pre-game whatever, I finally saw the last of the Wachowski Brothers’ Matrix Trilogy. The second film, Reloaded, was a terrible disappointment to me and this one was mainly interesting because of some recent conversations about the nature of consciousness. Revolutions was better than Reloaded but not even close to The Matrix.

I’m willing to chalk this up to bleed over from having seen Hellboy yesterday but I really felt like Andy and Larry Wachowski made this movie flailing around for an ending that would convey the weight of their concept while delivering the power and action enabled by innovative computer technology.

You may recall that as we left our heroes, Zion was facing imminent destruction while Neo and Agent Smith had just left the Matrix for flesh and blood; that’s where the action picks up. The two hours of screen time are filled with well done action, energy all over the place, masses of swarming machines charging into Zion and the humans fighting back with oversized machine guns. I certainly never got bored, wondering how long until the end.

But everything was the equivalent of a magician’s big hand wave, distracting the audience from the real movements that accomplish the mechanics of a trick. All the bullets fired from those machine guns, outrageously acrobatic hand to hand combat and the interpersonal emotions that are supposed to draw us into the characters fail. The man behind the curtain is exposed despite all the trickery.

Here’s the secret: everything we’ve seen, across all three movies, is unnecessary. The key to this revelation is Neo’s penultimate conversation with the Oracle, when he asks why she hasn’t given him the answer just supplied earlier; you weren’t ready, she said, and Neo is filled with understanding. Then he jumps in a ship with Trinity and runs off to Machine City so he can speak directly with the machines, who take him at his word and provide a connection to the Matrix where he and Smith stage their final, all or nothing martial arts bout.

Let me rant a bit now over egregious nonsense in Revolutions. The Zion army has very impresive technology, the ability to enter and leave the Matrix without notice of the Agents, vehicles with ultra-sophisticated power supplies and machine-killing weapons, and even those huge exoskeletons, but even though the machines that control the world can send nearly unlimited fighters to attack they’ve held off until just when the one human able to stand them off comes into the picture. And what is this Machine City?!?!?! Nothing less, apparently, then the controlling core of Earth’s masters, known to Neo and everyone in Zion, but not worthy of mention to us viewers until near the end. This is exactly the kind of hidden information that storytellers use when they’ve worked themselves into a corner and need a way out.

“Everything that has a beginning has an end.” This sentiment is expressed repeatedly and yet the Wachowski brothers evade facing it with their ending. The worst nonsense of all, suggesting volumes and saying nothing that any 12 year old doesn’t already understand. That’s perhaps the last piece of this puzzle allowing us to return to the trilogy’s origin: you got it, The Matrix started out as a comic book series.

not recommended

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Starship Troopers 2: Heroes of the Federation

Posted on February 1, 2005

Not Andy Warhol’s Bad. Just three movies that are uninteresting, incomprehensible and simply unwatchable. I couldn’t sit through more than the first 20 minutes or so of the first two, nor more than 10 of the third, and I’ll often watch movies to the end even so if there’s nothing better on. But not with Pieces of April, Barbershop or Starship Troopers 2: Heroes of the Federation; all three are not recommended

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The Fog of War

Posted on February 1, 2005

Better was Errol Morris’ acclaimed documentary The Fog of War. This film shows a great deal of creativity without letting the creative distract from its core, a lengthy interview with Robert McNamara structured as a series of lessons learned (and this is the film’s subtitle: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara). For you young’uns out there, this Bay Area native made three significant contributions to modern American society:

  1. Using methods developed for the military during WWII, during a 15 year stint at Ford Motor Company he brought statistical analysis into the corporate world; while much of his work was used to improve marketing he also brought out a number of safety enhancements such as seatbelts and steering wheels that wouldn’t impale a driver after a crash.
  2. Drawing criticism from all sides, he left Ford five weeks after being named president to serve as Secretary of Defense under JFK and LBJ; he was one of the key architects of our initial involvement and huge expansion in Vietnam–this period was of course the meat of the discussion,
  3. Leaving the Cabinet late in LBJ’s term, he was president of the World Bank for 13 years; there was very little mention of his work at the bank but under his leadership some very substantial development programs were funded, though a number later drew strong criticism as wasteful and riddled with corruption on the receiving end.

Movies are a visual medium, to say the least, and so Morris couldn’t simply point the camera at McNamara and ask his questions. Instead, he weaves period footage with bits filmed for this documentary with shots of the 85 year old man talking. The bits Morris filmed, though, weren’t recreations of big historical moments but instead simpler scenes or illustrations; examples are skulls being dropped down the center of a stairwell, an experiment McNamara had done at Cornell University to understand the impact on a person’s head of a crash and how different packaging could protect us better; close up shots of various reports, prose and numerical, as McNamara explains how or when that information was used; and, shots of an old reel-to-reel tape recorder as conversations between McNamara and one of the presidents he served discussed played. But our subject was also on screen quite a bit, generally in extreme close up.

There were some topics he wouldn’t discuss, and secrets he wouldn’t divulge. One comes to realize that, many years after the fact, McNamara understood that Vietnam might have been avoided if leaders on both sides had been willing to talk to each other. The US was caught up in the Cold War, still very raw after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the decisionmakers saw this little faraway country as a chess piece of suddenly significant consequence in blocking the Soviet Union and China. The Vietnamese wanted only to reunite their country and finally be free of foreign domination, and they viewed the Americans as latest in a long line of would-be colonial masters. I wonder, now, how different the last 40 years would have played out if somehow both sides had understood and corrected the other’s mistaken perceptions.

McNamara stands by his record, doesn’t try to whitewash or evade his part. Now that most of the other participants are dead, he provides a level of insight for Vietnam and his part in WWII that I believe is rarely matched by anyone on the inside of such significant historical controversies.

recommended

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Dirty War

Posted on January 25, 2005

HBO, BBC and PBS collaborated in producing a 90 minute film depicting the members of an Islamic terrorist group as they develop and explode a dirty bomb, a conventional explosive with some radioactive material above the explosive. Parallelling the fundamentalist, giving Dirty War some human scale, we are also shown a firefighter and his wife, an MP newly named minister for London and her top assistant, and a small police squad who happen onto the plotters–though not in time to stop them.

“The events portrayed in this film are based on extensive factual research.” That sentence, flashed on screen in the opening moments, the words are intentionally flat and emotionless, make the scenes that follow all the more chilling. For the most part, excepting the two scenes where police knock down house doors, director Daniel Percival and his writing partner Lizzie Mickery maintain that sort of everyday ambience for the entire film; even the one big explosion is left to the viewer’s imagination with the screen whiting out with a low key bit of noise.

The sequence of events, you’d usually say the plot, unfolds like the ticks of a clock. Someone in Pakistan has gotten hold of radioactive dust and carefully packs the shielded containers with bubble wrap in wholesale size cooking oil cans, then pours in the cooking oil to fill; the truck arrives in Bulgaria, the pallet transfered to an English driver’s lorrie; the barrels are unloaded in a quiet section of London and then delivered to the house where three bombs are to be made.

Some Muslim woman who owns a corner shop tips off the police and the newest addition to the anti-terror squad, a young Westernized muslim woman, runs the lead through the bureaucracy. All very methodical. Her team manages to identify the two men tipped by the shop owner and arrests them as they’re packing to flee. Despite somewhat aggressive interrogation techniques neither will talk, of course, other than to proclaim the greatness of their God. The Muslim copper finds a lead to another location used by the cell and races there, arriving just before the first bomb is exploded, at 8 a.m. outside a busy Underground station.

The police have identified two other vans that may be carrying addition dirty bombs but to avoid spooking the drivers are not moving in. One of the vans suddenly drives off and an unmarked car darts out in front, shooting quickly enough to kill the terrorists before their bomb is detonated. The remaining 15 minutes or so are used to show the aftermath, a bit of the personal, mostly larger scale, especially the containment of crowds of potentially irradiated people, tens of thousands, who were far enough away to escape a violent death but close enough to the explosion to need decontamination. These people are not happy at the slow pace and lack of comforts.

The final shots are an aerial tour of the huge section of London which has been fenced off and cannot be entered for 30-50 years. Millions of square feet of office space, thousands of shops and homes, cars left to rust in place. No mention of that third bomb either.

The actors are almost unnoticable, though I mean this as a compliment. Koel Purie, Ewan Stewart, Alistair Galbraith and William El-Gardi, thinking back on the performances, were so submerged in their characters they were able to deliver what Percival needed from them. Compared to, for instance, the histrionics seen constantly in 24 the cast allows viewers space and mental energy to consider the real world meaning of what would be a catastrophe dwarfing 9/11 or the Madrid bombings.

highly recommended

Note: This topic has been popular recently with Hollywood types: TNT and the BBC co-produced a miniseries called The Grid, FX had a film called Smallpox, Day 3 of 24 had narco-terrorists attempt to infect LA with a very nasty bug and the current series is going in the direction of Islamic terrorists and nuclear emergency on our soil, and A&E’s (British import) MI-5 has more than one episode on some aspect of the concept; one can even go back a few years to the George Clooney/Nicole Kidman movie The Peacemaker. The excellent PBS series frontline features al qeada’s new front tonight while that network will broadcast Dirty War late next month. Further, John Robb’s latest post to Global Guerillas suggests that despite the absense of any successful attacks on American soil in three years there has not been an absense of planning for them.

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