It is preaching a message tho, it’s an American war movie written and funded by the DoD that paints their imperialist actions in a good light
Also the average Westoid complaining about character development :data-laughing: marvel movies have killed all media literacy
(CW: CSA bro wtf)
The book relied on a dramatization of participant accounts, which were the basis of the movie. SPC John Stebbins was renamed as fictional "John Grimes." Stebbins had been convicted by court martial in 1999 for the rape and forcible sodomy of his six-year-old daughter. Mark Bowden said the Pentagon, ever sensitive about public image, decided to alter factual history by requesting the change
Also depicts the Somalis as just these warlike orcs hellbent on killing for blood without explaining that maybe these people don't want the USA meddling in their affairs. Nah, they're just savages.
They have like a pretty decent section in the documentary Theaters of War, about Pentagon and CIA involvement in Hollywood film development specifically about Black Hawk Down and how it serves to fundamentally rewrite the narrative on Somalia.
(Available to stream for free on Kanopy if you have a library card)
Right, some cursory reading debunks a lot of that horseshit and gives significant context that was lacking (as is often the case with American war movies)
In the wake of Barre’s ouster, the U.S. conveniently donned the cloak of humanitarianism, citing the famine as justification for military intervention. Significantly, the most severe period of the famine had passed several monthsbefore the U.S. declared its commitment to ending hunger in Somalia. In 1992—on the eve of the invasion—the death rate had fallen by 90 percent, according to Africa Watch.
Fighting the warlords” became the new call to action. The victor over Barre, Gen. Mohamed Ali Farah Aidid, wasn’t willing to make deals with the U.S. Soon after the invasion, food distribution was undermined by U.S. determination to rout Aidid by boosting forces loyal to the West, such as the self-declared President Ali Mahdi Muhammad.
Soldiers were heard repeating the slogan “The only good Somali is a dead Somali.”
Three months earlier [Before the events of "Black Hawk Down"], a missile attack by U.S. helicopters had killed fifty to seventy clan elders and intellectuals, many of them moderates attempting to broker a settlement to the war. According to the New York Times, U.S. officials estimated casualties of 6,000 to 10,000 Somalis—two-thirds of them women and children—in the summer of 1993 alone.
In fact, unarmed men, women and children became open targets for American troops. A writer for Britain’s Independent described how “[i]n one incident, Rangers took a family hostage. When one of the women started screaming at the Americans, she was shot dead. In another incident, a Somali prisoner was allegedly shot dead when he refused to stop praying outside. Another was clubbed into silence.”
After the Battle of Mogadishu, Canada, Belgium, and Italy all investigated charges of torture and murder committed by their troops, but the U.S. never issued a reprimand or even an inquiry. The trials in Belgium uncovered horrific evidence of abuse—including a sergeant accused of force-feeding a Muslim Somali child with pork and salted water until he vomited, and a sergeant major photographed urinating on the apparently dead body of a young man.
Meanwhile, “humanitarian relief” aid agencies working in places like Somalia reaped a massive boon through government contracts. As Somalia expert Alex De Waal put it, “Somalia is a striking manifestation of a new doctrine in international affairs, which we might call ‘humanitarian impunity,’ where aid-givers and peacekeepers, not local civilians, are becoming the beneficiaries of international law.”
All told, of the $1.5 billion earmarked by the UN for “humanitarian” intervention in Somalia, only 10 percent was spent on lifesaving work. The bulk of the funds went to the more than 28,000 troops that occupied Somalia, including the deployment of over 100 tanks, armored vehicles, attack helicopters, airborne gunships, and an aircraft carrier. Clinton eventually withdrew all troops by March 1994, and remaining UN peacekeeping forces were pulled out the next year.
Also, somewhat unrelated...I just did some searching and saw a lot of headlines with "Somalia on the verge of famine" written in Sept 2022
:rust-darkness:
Come and See's blue curtains would just be "Nazis are evil and everyone dies in war, usually in a mundane and sudden way"
That's just someone with no brain. Even a child could understand the subtext of that movie because it isn't hidden behind anything and is presented to you in giant flashing neon text and followed by loud megaphones of people saying "WAR IS HELL, THIS IS SUFFERING, THERE IS NOTHING GLORIOUS ABOUT DEATH"
This site has free and open registration, it's our duty to bully people who deserve it. Point me in their direction and I'll commence bullying
Fun fact: that "well-disciplined VC" door gunner guy was the one originally slated to be the drill sergeant. But then Lee Ermey auditioned, and Kubrick gave him the job immediately.
Dunkirk is pretty good and simultaneously manages to be one of those non-stop war movies while at the same time actually conveying the horror and human cost of war.
Also it has Harry Styles in it
:bottom-speak:
black hawk down literally plays cool rock music whenever the white american soldiers are on screen and spooky arabian tunes whenever the muslim enemies are onscreen
How can you hate an organization that tries to mind control everyone with a hair metal band named Cold Slither?
There was a propaganda RTS war game I had as a kid called Real War:Rogue states about playing as the heroic US military fighting a nondescript middle eastern group. For a game that came out before the invasion of Iraq, its very much a game about invading Iraq. The soundtrack is pretty good all around, but the "terrorist" music is way, way better, so I always played as them and spammed SCUD missiles instead.
I like war movies that show action but also anti war at the same time.
Even watching it when I was a teen as a lib it always struck me about how we're supposed to feel bad for the 18 Americans that bit it when hundreds of Somalis were killed.
It did prompt me to read the book in high school which actually contains some PoV chapters from civilians who lived through it. They described how terrifying the Americans were for the locals.
The Mogadishu Massacre. US troops open fire on civilians, killing 5,000 people in a single night. The troops were supposedly there to stop a famine, but the famine was already over by the time the soldiers arrived.
What's everyone's opinion on Jarhead?
I haven't seen it in a while but I've been meaning to. I got to thinking about it a bit ago and I think it might actually be an interesting and misunderstood statement about war movies.
They didn't make an antiwar film. They made an anti war film. They did a film about the sheer banality of warfare and actually turned the camera on the audience to point out how many people in the theater went there specifically because they got hard as shit watching "Saving private Ryan" or "black hawk down" and they wanted more.
Like, if you're a teenager and just like to get strung out on adrenaline, yeah, it's a great movie. As a teenager I was one of the thousand kids who modeled my airsoft layout on that movie. Don't have to do much thinking, just watch shit get blasted. But you're supposed to age out of that at some point
Dudes will say this but then call Battle at Lake Changjin shameless propaganda
well the ebil asiatic hordes are portrayed as people and the heroic westerners are portrayed as doofuses and nutjobs :so-true:
the portrayal of the un troops was actually fairly solid, like they werent shown to be incompetent or evil, just standard people with some hilarious(ly bad) lines and honestly more respect for the chinese than they actually showed :shrug-outta-hecks:
Weirdly enough, I actually know a few of the delta psychos that were there. I can't say the name of one of them without actually doxxing myself, but I can say I've met the king nutcase Jerry Boykin.
Dude believes straight up that prayer and preachers leading church militia families won the American Revolution, and that to take back the country from the Satanists and communists we need to do the same thing again.
