Get ready for more war movies

Australian Broadcasting Corporation ^ | March 10, 2010 | Lisa Millar

[myknowledge]

Along Pennsylvania Avenue, about 500 metres from the White House, sits the Newseum - an impressive building devoted to the history and future of the media.

I've told all my friends who've visited over the last eight months that it was worth a trip.

But that advice was based on second-hand information because I'd never actually been there myself.

So on an almost spring-like day this past weekend I walked down towards the National Mall and spent a few hours inside this monument to free press.

I was struck as I sat with 20 others watching a short film about September 11 and how journalists reacted on the morning and were able to work and get their material to air, that despite the intervening years, the grief over the terrorists attacks is still very raw.

The older Jewish woman next to me began crying first. Then someone behind was sniffling. Apart from the sound of tissues being crunched in tense hands, there was silence.

You barely have to scratch the surface of the American psyche to find the sorrow.

Now, it seems, the two wars that began in the aftermath of that event are considered box office material.

And I wondered - with the awarding of best picture to The Hurt Locker - if we're suddenly going to see a flood of war movies?

If you've been otherwise engaged for the last month, The Hurt Locker is about a team of bomb disposal specialists in Iraq and their renegade leader who pushes the envelope in the way he deals with his job and his colleagues.

I only saw the movie for the first time a few weeks ago. I had to buy it on cable because so few theatres were showing it here in DC.

It hadn't found many fans at the box office. The suggestion was that audiences were shell-shocked enough by the nightly news coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Next week America will mark the seventh anniversary of the start of that war in Iraq.

On March 19, 2003, from his desk in the Oval Office, George W Bush told the American public the bombs were dropping on Baghdad.

It wasn't just The Hurt Locker that got off to a slow start. Previous films about Iraq have also struggled. The man who brought the world NYPD Blue and Hill Street Blues created Over There in 2005 - a TV series about a unit of the Third Infantry Division. It followed the fictional soldiers on their first tour of duty and the effects on their families back home. It sunk without a trace.

So what's happened - apart from a few intervening years - that we've got to a place where a war movie - and a violent uncompromising one at that - is named best picture at the Oscars?

Robert Thompson is a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University and has his finger on the pulse when it comes to audience likes and dislikes.

"It's not so much that Hurt Locker is saying that we're now ready to watch dramas about this war and this theme and all the rest of it," Professor Thompson said.

"I think what it says is that Hurt Locker is a really good movie, one that the Academy responded to and now probably with all the attention it goes that a lot more people will see than would otherwise have seen it."

Much has been made of The Hurt Locker's apolitical approach to war and perhaps that's helped its success.

There were two other war dramas released last year as well - Brothers and The Messenger - both of which didn't shy away from the trauma that comes with sending young men and women to war.

They got good reviews but certainly didn't shatter any attendance records.

Robert Thompson doesn't think The Hurt Locker's win indicates a vast change in the appetite of audiences.

If it had been getting the kind of box office buzz that Avatar was getting he might feel differently.

But he is pretty sure about one thing.

The people with the cheque books who decide whether they'll give a movie the go ahead or not will be more inclined to say yes the next time an enthusiastic producer arrives on their doorstep with a cracker of a war tale to tell.

That still leaves the question of September 11 and the fact that adults will weep watching reporters tell their stories in the short film at the Newseum.

Oliver Stone tried his hand at dramatising the terror attacks from a New York viewpoint.

But the more successful pieces have been on the flight 93 - the plane where passengers tried to overpower the hijackers.

"Film makers and artists and everybody else knew that they had to deal with it but they had to get away from the actual heart of darkness," Professor Thompson said.

"So instead of setting it in lower Manhattan as Oliver Stone did, they moved it to a story that was able to talk about September 11 but it was the one story that had something I guess you could call a happy ending. Now that's a terrible way to put it because everyone in that plane died but there was a story there that had a certain uplifting factor that moved us away from something we'd already seen."

But perhaps the reason the war movies might find greater success than any film set in Manhattan on September 11 is that the most compelling 'movie' was made that day. How do you recreate something that was filmed and watched by billions around the world as it actually happened?

[myknowledge]

The Hurt Locker won a Oscar, but more war movies are on the way.

Wonder if we'll see a war movie with women in combat, tangling alongside the men side by side?

[EyeGuy]

“But the more successful pieces have been on the flight 93 - the plane where passengers tried to overpower the hijackers.”

####

That is because Americans believe in fighting back.

We are used to winning, and we will win again.

But first, we must we rid ourselves of the Communist, progressive plague with we are now saddled.

[Falcon28]

Now that Obambi is in the WH, war movies are okay, even pro-war films. It's okay to be pro-troop now that Dems are in control. This is how Hollywood thinks. But when Bush was in the WH, war was evil and our troops were sadistic barbarians.

[Liberty Valance]

I like a good war movie.

The Big Red One comes to mind ;o)

[eclecticEel]

Wonder if we'll see a war movie with women in combat

Yes, but then in the last twenty minutes they'll pull a plot twist and make it into a pro-assisted suicide flick.

[SWAMPSNIPER]

I want to see movies about peasants chasing corrupt politicians with pitchforks and torches!

[Liberty Valance]