Did it for a while starting in the 1790’s until we got our deepwater Navy MoJo rolling.
So it’s not as if the practice is unprecedented.
Isn’t it about time where we make another WWII movie?
We haven’t had a new one in 3 years: https://www.imdb.com/list/ls059324807/?sort=release_date,desc&st_dt=&mode=detail&page=1
1. I think those are popular because that’s the last war where we definitively won.
2. It’s the last war where we had a just cause. Not an expeditionary campaign, or with false justifications etc.
3. Besides, no one complains if we kill thousands of Nazi’s (not even today’s Germans)...
If you make a movie today and kill black people, well that is racist: Zulu https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058777/ (You can’t make that today - even if it’s factually correct!)
If you make the Chinese as the bad guys as in Red Dawn II, the Chinese threaten to block it and we don’t want that: https://screenrant.com/red-dawn-villains-china-north-korea/
You don’t want to piss off the Vietnamese, Muslims, Saudi’s, Japanese, or even the Iranians...
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/37394
http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1598886,00.html
So it’s best that we stick with the “Nazi’s” or “Russians.” Our eternal bad guys. That way we can have an action pact war movie where we win, feel good about ourselves, and not have to worry about the social/political/economic considerations.
We’re too chicken shit and PC to fight and win against our enemies today even in a movie!
If we do make a movie where we’re fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, etc... Even if it is historical in Israel and something like Christians vs. Muslims, we’ll have to make it conflicted where the good guy is bad and the bad guy is good, where you have good Muslims too, where we started it all because of the Crusades 1,000 years ago, where we did something questionable and it’s all actually our fault: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0320661/ (just a bunch of historical inaccuracies and cliche’s).
Think about this, that movie came out 4 years after 9-11 and it probably took a year or two to make it.