
I think people have been trying to make anti-war movies for just about ever — and have been writing about it even longer. The Red Badge of Courage comes to mind as one of the earliest, but the entire field of history is based on “The Histories” by Heroditus, which was a written documentation of about 5 wars, but attempted to explain the hostility between the Greeks and non-Greeks. Someone, somewhere, wrote that it was created to try to prevent wars from ever happening again, but I think that’s b.s.
There is no way, as some have observed, to make a movie that purports to be anti-war which does not, in some way, feed the human thirst for war. The biggest offender of all the movies I’ve seen, was Platoon — Oliver Stone’s homoerotic take on the Vietnam war. Full Metal Jacket at the very least, pulled away from a specific anti-war message and made you wonder what the hell is going on in boot camps. The Deer Hunter was certainly harrowing but I wouldn’t call it anti-war. In fact, it seemed that he was almost a better person after having survived Vietnam because he had compassion for an animal he was going to kill. Before the war he would have killed it like those awful people do that pay for trophies in Africa — without a thought. And The Killing Fields may have come closest to capturing the horror, unlike Apocalypse Now which captured the absurdity.
War and combat excite people. It is written into our dna. I remember one foreign film where this guy was following a trail of clues to find his girlfriend and had to spend a night with some farmers. The mother of the house said, “Tomorrow we’re going to slaughter a pig. That oughta be fun.” Even a writer I loathe wrote a book called, “War is a force that gives life meaning.”
War movies inevitably confirm the excitement of war — as seen from a distance. All the screaming, blood, severed limbs, blindness, concussions and on and on and on don’t make us stop to think, “Maybe we should stop doing this.” Even now, in the 2020s, you can sense the drumbeat of warmongers, itching to get out there and kill others, destroy property, terrorize innocent people.
So it was interesting to watch this movie which is called exactly what it is because it attempts to not indulge our thirst to see bloodshed and fighting. Long periods of the movie are simply about waiting. The movie opens with some bizarre cis male hetero scene where the company is watching a workout video that could have been from the 80s, and screeching and hollering like none of them had ever seen a woman before. It was very bizarre given the amount of porn that exists on the internet. I took it as a forced male bonding scene.
But as a movie, there is literally almost no beginning, middle or end. We don’t know why they have taken over some family’s home — this is in Iraq and somewhere it’s written what battle it’s supposed to be. The only “event” that I could glean from this is that they have to get out, and in their first attempt, one is killed and two are injured, badly. There appears to be “enemies” on all sides of their house and on the roof. They call in some cavalry in the form of tanks and air support. They make their way to the tanks and leave. After that, all the enemies come out of their positions, gather on the street, and look at each other as if to say, “What was that all about?”
It’s 90 minutes but it felt like 15 because of the lack of anything happening. I also fell asleep at the very start of it. Does it give the sense that war should be avoided and that war mongers, like Peter Hesgeth, should be beheaded? No. It’s ultimately as if some people came into a conference room, had an argument with some of the staff, and then left.
War cannot be made unpalatable in the movie experience. We are too visual. It’s like John Krazinsky as Jim Halpert said, “Am I going to tell me daughter that violent video games are objectively more entertaining?”
I think Steven Spielberg, again, saw the absurdity of trying to show “nice cartoons,” in the opening cartoon to “Jessica Rabbit,” where he sort of had a Tom & Jerry character bashing each other and electrocuting each other and chopping each other up with a carving knife. People’s excited reaction and laughter to that cartoon said it all.