Tagged: war movies
“Low IQ”, Review of “House of Dynamite, by ZDT Chick
Who can forget Hurt Locker? And I have commented elsewhere that Zero Dark Thirty is genuinely remarkable. It’s not a secret that I generally despise movies made by streamers, but for these two portfolio-ck reasons, I held out hope that House of Dynamite would be excellent.
To be sure, it passes the time. That’s the main requirement I have for movies these days. And it succeeds in passing the time divertingly. I’m actually surprised how late it got without me noticing.
But in the time that passed between when the project started to the time it was released, we have seen a tremendous shift in the decisiveness of American leadership at the top. So the whole movie feels less than excellent.
There is a fairly viral video of candidate Trump, and his team at the time, watching the DNC Harris speech together, wherein we got to see an intimate portrait of these people at work. If you haven’t watched it, here’s a link to one dude’s clip of it.
The overall point is, politics aside, the man running the show is decisive. Sure, TACO is a real criticism on some level, but it’s difficult to measure because it is reasonable that many TACO events are only TACO-narrative-feeders if the timeline is the incorrect length. Not to mention, TACO is more about matching talk to walk, not walk as opposed to stay still. Or “paralysis by analysis” as some pilots would say.
For this movie review’s point, which is inescapably a review of the concept of reacting to a nuclear attack on America, President Trump and his team—again, regardless of the politics—will be decisive and with a speed that impresses even “high functioning” people. This belief was actually comforting during the film.
In short, while Bigelow’s movie intends on illustrating that Earth truly is a house of dynamite—the description is not merely a metaphor—it fails. This is because the leaders—metaphorical fathers?—in the film are portrayed as “indecisive and low IQ”. (Except the interrogator guy from ZDT. He gets my vote for who should be in charge.)
Put another way, could someone please make a movie based on the exact same scenario, but show how it would play out when decisive leaders are in charge? That version would be far more interesting to see. And it would naturally offer an actual answer to the still-compelling question, “Do we live in a house of dynamite?”
Review of Good Kill, directed by Andrew Niccol
You know that a movie is no good when it’s available for free in high definition on the internet one month before it is in theaters. I actually have a theory about these things. You can’t tell me that all the big movies, like Furious 7, have some special agreement within their production team to not leak a copy early to the internet and that the lesser movies aren’t able to form this sort of solidarity. So my theory is that certain movies, even ones with A-list-ers, are purposefully leaked so the studio or powers that be can get a feel, or more properly, brace themselves for the box office flop that they already fear they’ve produced. Niccol’s flick Good Kill starring Ethan Hawke is just such a movie.
If you haven’t heard of the film that isn’t due in theaters until May 15th, it’s essentially American Sniper, except that it’s about an USAF drone pilot instead of a Navy SEAL sniper. But all the familiar themes are there–estranged wife, alcohol abuse, PTSD, questioning the war, suspected adultery on all sides.
Naturally, I watched the film because it’s about something very close to home. When I worked shifts in the operations center overseas, I watched “predator-vision,” as they called it, and saw little black missiles zip from the top left of the screen onto the astonishingly unsuspecting bad guy. I heard knuckleheads cheer in a way that made me uncomfortable, though I was never certain which of us was expressing the proper sentiment after witnessing such things.
I’ll tell you what my favorite part of the movie was, the movie that no one should watch (it really is terrible and boring and filled with an agenda that is not hidden anywhere close to well enough to be powerful), my favorite part of the movie were the scenes where the camera lingered–perhaps unintentionally–on shots of the six or seven trailers that were essentially the cockpits of the unmanned aircraft. There was just something about the idea that in the middle of the desert in an unknown location, Air Force personnel are sitting inside tan double-wides and sniping terrorists seven thousand miles away. It’s difficult to articulate my feelings about it, but especially if the director lingered on purpose, I think those scenes are the “a picture’s worth a thousand words” that define the issue (or whatever we’re calling it.)
In the end, I don’t know why I watch these movies and I’m probably going to call it quits soon. Hollywood’s proven they can get insider information and make a realistic movie, but Good Kill is just another example that despite this access they have nothing valuable to say on the matter.
Captain’s Log 