'Film: The Dogs of WarNEWS: Can David Simon's Generation Kill save the Iraq War movie?
By Ethan Brown
July/August 2008 Issue
on february 26, Washington Post military correspondent Thomas Ricks logged on to an online chat to discuss the war in Iraq, only to find that the number of readers awaiting him had reached its lowest point since the war started. "Our little group of people who still care about the Iraq war appears to be dwindling," Ricks wrote. Surveying the nearly empty chat room, Ricks offered a self-mocking take on the quote from Shakespeare's Henry V that had inspired the title of Stephen Ambrose's book about World War II paratroopers and the popular hbo miniseries based on it. "We few, we (un)happy few," Ricks wrote. "We band of brothers."
America's profound disconnect from the Iraq War has been nowhere more evident than in Hollywood. Five years into the war, there has yet to be a truly memorable or defining movie about the conflict. The few major Iraq-themed movies—Stop-Loss, In the Valley of Elah, and Redacted—have tanked at the box office, and the indifferent reaction to these heavy-handed attempts at relevance seems to have soured the industry on the idea of trying to bring Iraq to the screen. The Lucky Ones, an upcoming film starring Tim Robbins as a recently returned vet, reportedly doesn't include a single mention of the I-word. "If most critics use the word 'Iraq' in the opening sentence of their reviews, we'll deal with it," an executive at Lionsgate, the movie's distributor, told the New York Times. "Do I wish they wouldn't? Sure. But more than anything, I want them to write that it's a good movie."
Is it even possible to make a good movie about a war that's still being fought? Americans' battle fatigue only partly explains why Iraq films have flopped. Another reason is the way they have awkwardly shoehorned political talking points into soldiers' stories. In Stop-Loss, an Army sergeant (Ryan Phillippe) returns from Iraq only to face an "involuntary extension" of his service. In the Valley of Elah was a meandering whodunit about a retired military policeman (Tommy Lee Jones) who tries to find his son, an Army specialist who goes awol after coming back from Iraq. Both were oddly hesitant about depicting the actual war, skirting battlefield images in favor of making statements. Director Brian De Palma's Redacted tackled a real-life atrocity—the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by American soldiers—but its combat scenes were ruined by its didactic approach.
Thankfully, the new hbo miniseries Generation Kill, which begins July 13, is neither squeamish nor ham-fisted. That's not surprising, considering that its executive producers and writers are David Simon and Ed Burns, the creative team behind the acclaimed and sorely missed series The Wire. In seven one-hour episodes, Simon and Burns meticulously re-create journalist Evan Wright's 2004 firsthand account of the Marine Corps' 1st Reconnaissance Battalion's six-week march to Baghdad in 2003. As might be expected, Generation Kill is violent, profane, and thoroughly engrossing.
In classic Simon style, the narrative unfolds with a deliberate pace that will be familiar to Wire fans yet frustrate casual viewers. Nearly the entire first episode depicts the bored Marines biding their time in Kuwait before war is declared. Still, Generation Kill has a shaky, nervous intensity; it feels as if you are in the Humvees with the Marines. There's lots of realistic dialogue, peppered with references to sitreps (situation reports) and other military jargon, and a vast cast of fully drawn characters.'
America's profound disconnect from the Iraq War has been nowhere more evident than in Hollywood. Five years into the war, there has yet to be a truly memorable or defining movie about the conflict. The few major Iraq-themed movies—Stop-Loss, In the Valley of Elah, and Redacted—have tanked at the box office, and the indifferent reaction to these heavy-handed attempts at relevance seems to have soured the industry on the idea of trying to bring Iraq to the screen. The Lucky Ones, an upcoming film starring Tim Robbins as a recently returned vet, reportedly doesn't include a single mention of the I-word. "If most critics use the word 'Iraq' in the opening sentence of their reviews, we'll deal with it," an executive at Lionsgate, the movie's distributor, told the New York Times. "Do I wish they wouldn't? Sure. But more than anything, I want them to write that it's a good movie."
Is it even possible to make a good movie about a war that's still being fought? Americans' battle fatigue only partly explains why Iraq films have flopped. Another reason is the way they have awkwardly shoehorned political talking points into soldiers' stories. In Stop-Loss, an Army sergeant (Ryan Phillippe) returns from Iraq only to face an "involuntary extension" of his service. In the Valley of Elah was a meandering whodunit about a retired military policeman (Tommy Lee Jones) who tries to find his son, an Army specialist who goes awol after coming back from Iraq. Both were oddly hesitant about depicting the actual war, skirting battlefield images in favor of making statements. Director Brian De Palma's Redacted tackled a real-life atrocity—the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by American soldiers—but its combat scenes were ruined by its didactic approach.
Thankfully, the new hbo miniseries Generation Kill, which begins July 13, is neither squeamish nor ham-fisted. That's not surprising, considering that its executive producers and writers are David Simon and Ed Burns, the creative team behind the acclaimed and sorely missed series The Wire. In seven one-hour episodes, Simon and Burns meticulously re-create journalist Evan Wright's 2004 firsthand account of the Marine Corps' 1st Reconnaissance Battalion's six-week march to Baghdad in 2003. As might be expected, Generation Kill is violent, profane, and thoroughly engrossing.
In classic Simon style, the narrative unfolds with a deliberate pace that will be familiar to Wire fans yet frustrate casual viewers. Nearly the entire first episode depicts the bored Marines biding their time in Kuwait before war is declared. Still, Generation Kill has a shaky, nervous intensity; it feels as if you are in the Humvees with the Marines. There's lots of realistic dialogue, peppered with references to sitreps (situation reports) and other military jargon, and a vast cast of fully drawn characters.'
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