100 BEST WAR MOVIES: 7. Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

 

            “Zero Dark Thirty” is the story of the manhunt for Osama Bin Laden and his assassination. It was directed by Kathryn Bigelow. It was her next film after winning Best Picture and Best Director for “The Hurt Locker”. She was the first female director to win Best Director. She co-produced “Zero Dark Thirty”. Her screenwriter again was Mark Boal. The duo had intended to make a film about the Battle of Tora Bora, but before they started production, Bin Laden was killed and they decided to shift the focus to how that came about. Luckily, a lot of Boal’s research was applicable to the new focus. The movie cost about $50 million. Some of that money to a recreation of Bin Laden's compound. The film was successful and made $133 million. It was acclaimed and made many critics’ top ten lists. It was nominated for Oscars for Best Picture (losing to the inferior “Argo”), Best Actress (Jessica Chastain lost to Jennifer Lawrence in “Silver Linings Playbook”), Best Original Score (Boal lost to Tarantino for “Django Unchained”), and Best Film Editing. It won for Best Sound Editing. The film was a favorite for Best Picture, but criticism of its depiction of the use of torture created a backlash.

            The movie starts powerfully with telephone calls from victims of the Twin Towers destruction on 9/11. Once the stakes are established, the film becomes the story of one woman’s quest to get Bin Laden. Jessica Chastain plays Maya, who is a composite character, but based on an actual female CIA agent.  She portrays the CIA operative as obsessive and persevering (to the point of being a pain in the ass to her superiors).  Her evolution from naïve to hard as nails in the world of black sites is a theme.  Bigelow and Boal made a great decision to concentrate on this woman and build up to the mission by showing the frustrating quest to locate OBL (the movie does not dumb it down for the current events-challenged masses). The quest involves torture ("enhanced interrogation") which leads eventually to a courier which leads to the compound Bin Laden was living in. It’s not an easy journey and includes the suicide bomb death of her colleague Jessica (Jennifer Ehle). The last act is the mission to kill Bin Laden. The SEAL team is America’s best special forces operatives and they are realistically played. The reenactment is mesmerizing even for those who know what will happen.  The flight into Abbottabad  has the best use of music that I can recall in a scene like this.  Not bombastic.  I would best describe it as SEALish.  The “assault” is a blend of POV  (through night vision goggles) and fly on the wall cinematography. It’s a happy ending that was not forced because it is true.

Chastain deserved the Oscar. She is perfect in a role that would normally be a male role. Chastain is well-supported by a strong cast. It’s not all-star, but you’ll recognize many solid performers.  The biggest surprise is Chris Pratt as a Navy SEAL.  He does inject a little humor into a deadly serious movie. He’s not the class clown, but elite military types often have good senses of humor.  By the way, there is also a major part for one of my favorite actresses - Jennifer Ehle (the miniseries “Pride and Prejudice”).

            I won’t give away the plot.  The movie works on two levels.  If you are like me and have a working knowledge of the war on terrorism, it is exciting to see some key events reenacted suspensefully.  It does help to know the basics.  The dialogue assumes that.  There are numerous references to KSM (google his ugly ass).  I almost envy the majority of Americans who will find the entire movie suspenseful because they do not know what will happen next.

ACTING:   A+                

ACTION:   A+ (6/10) the only combat is the kill mission

ACCURACY: A  (hard to judge since the CIA actions are classified)      

PLOT:  A               

REALISM:   A 

CINEMATOGRAPHY:   A

SCORE:   A

SCENE:  the mission

QUOTE:  Maya:  [to Navy SEALs] Quite frankly, I didn't even want to use you guys, with your dip and velcro and all your gear bullshit. I wanted to drop a bomb. But people didn't believe in this lead enough to drop a bomb. So they're using you guys as canaries. And, in theory, if bin Laden isn't there, you can sneak away and no one will be the wiser. But bin Laden is there. And you're going to kill him for me.

            Interestingly, the movie does not do the cliché of describing the mission plan.  This was a good decision for both the informed and the historical illiterates.  It also does not flesh out the SEAL characters.  However, small touches make it clear they are not only heroes, but professionals.  There is an understated scene where Maya watches them play horse shoes and is stunned to learn that they know they are going on the mission that very night.  Subtle, but brilliant.  The movie also avoids the cliché of the corrupt or clueless authorities.  No Americans are villains.  It does take to task the risk-averse, but they are portrayed as simply too careful.   Then again, Maya is portrayed as an obsessed bitch.  Thank God she was!  CIA Director Leon Panetta comes off well, but there is little reference to Obama and none to Bush, Jr.  The movie does not lionize Obama for giving the green light.  It does not demonize Muslims.  In fact, a CIA official is tellingly depicted on his prayer mat.

            As far as accuracy, I could detect nothing egregious. The Camp Chapman suicide bombing is accurately depicted. However, much of the movie depicts events that are still classified. I trust Boal when he says the screenplay is based on research.  It also does not sugar coat what happened in that compound.  Spoiler alert:  there is no attempt to take OBL alive.  As to the controversial depiction of torture and the actionable results from inhumane interrogation, I would be surprised if those types of things did not happen.  You may want to believe otherwise, but get your head out of the sand.   It is a crying shame that the ostriches prevented this movie from a deserved Best Picture Oscar.  It is a travesty that they deprived Bigelow of a director nomination.

            In conclusion, “Zero Dark Thirty” tells the story many had been waiting to see.  It does it in a well-crafted way that does justice to history.  It is better than “The Hurt Locker” and “Lincoln”.  It will have its detractors and where you stand on this is telling.  I can tell you this much, if the movie would have been about Tora Bora, where we completely botched the chance to kill the most wanted man on Earth, it would have been a very depressing movie. You would not have left the theater thinking “USA USA USA!” You did with this movie even though it was not trying to elicit that response.

The 24th (2020)

 

            “The 24^th” is a motion picture about the infamous Houston Riot of 1917. It was directed and co-written by Kevin Willmot who also wrote the screenplay for “Da 5 Bloods”.  It started with the 24^th Regiment, an all-black unit led by white officers, arrives outside Houston to guard the construction of a training camp. A camp that will train white soldiers before they go to the Western Front in France. The men of the 24^th want to go also, but the Army does not plan on putting them in combat. Their commanding officer, Col. Norton (Thomas Haden Church) is not a bigot and it has hit the ceiling in his career and his hopes for combat because he is loyal to his men. His second in command represents the majority of white officers who commanded black units in WWI and WWII. The movie focuses on a few of the blacks, especially Corporal Boston (Trai Byers). He is more intelligent than his peers and Norton urges him to go to officer training. Boston has a bad relationship with Private Walker (Mo McRae) who considers him to be an Uncle Tom and who resents his intelligence. Their relationship reminds of Searles and Trip in “Glory” with Norton resembling  Col. Shaw. The unit’s sergeant is named Hayes (Mykelti Williamson) is a lifer who has given up on the Army treating blacks well.

            Almost as soon as they get to the camp, they are harassed by the white construction workers who are led by a flaming racist. Boston tries the “you are talking to an American soldier” route which is met with jeers. You may be wearing a uniform, but you still are a n-word. He gets beaten when he refuses to give up his seat on a train. “Jim Crow is the law here.” When the white racist kills a black man, the local sheriff lets him out of jail.  Nortan is sympathetic, but he can’t change the system. And then he reluctantly agrees to a promotion to a white unit heading for France. The new commander, his exec Major Lockhart, is a bigot. With Norton gone, things spiral out of control. When a rumor hits the camp that a soldier was killed by cops and Boston is in jail, the blacks arm themselves. Sgt. Hayes changes his tune and leads the men into Houston because they are fed up with the treatment. This results in the killing of some police and civilians. The movie concludes with the court martial.

            “The 24^th” is a low budget movie that sincerely wants to bring a forgotten event in American History to the screen. Most Americans are not aware of the riot which resulted in the largest murder trial in the history of the Army. The 369^th Infantry Regiment (the Harlem Hellfighters) has gotten good coverage as the most famous unit to fight in the trenches. It was loaned to the French army because Gen. Pershing did not have confidence in black troops. That discrimination was slight compared to what black soldiers faced in the U.S. if they were stationed in the South. “The 24^th” has some truly despicable whites, but when I attempt to describe them as cartoonish villains, I have to remind myself that there were people like that. When black soldiers were treated like scum in spite of serving their country, you wonder what took them so long to snap. You will root for them to get payback, but the movie accurately portrays their actions as murder.

            The characters are all stereotypes, but the cast is decent. The focus on Boston was wise and his romance with a black woman feels real. Not surprisingly, there is a love triangle involving Walker. Church is the big star in the cast and his character is appealing as the rare white officer who treats his men as equals. The film has the feel of a Hallmark movie and the sincerity can be a bit cloying, but as a history lesson is has a lot to offer. As you can see below, it is an accurate depiction of the mutiny and although the scenes before that are probably fictional, it does a good job of showing why the soldiers were provoked. And I have to credit the movie with not justifying what the soldiers did that night. It was murder and not justified, but understandable.

GRADE = C

HISTORICAL ACCURACY:  The film is admirably accurate. The riot is also known as the Camp Logan Mutiny, which fits because that is what the soldiers did. The unit was actually the 3^rd Battalion of the 24^th Infantry Regiment (one of the original all-black units created for the Indian Wars, hence the name Buffalo Soldiers). The treatment they received from the white community and especially the all-white Houston Police Department is accurate. Most of the main characters are real, but with the names changed. On August 23, 1917, policemen Lee Sparks and Rufus Daniels fired shots to break up a peaceful crowd in a black neighborhood. When the blacks fled, Sparks chased and ended up breaking into a home where he found a black woman. He pulled her out of the house to arrest her. Private Alonzo Edwards intervened and offered to take custody of the woman. He was pistol-whipped and arrested. Later that day, Corporal Charles Baltimore (obviously Boston in the movie) approached Sparks to ask about Edwards, he was hit by Sparks’ pistol and ran with shots chasing him. He was found hiding under a bed and taken to jail. At the camp, rumor spread that Baltimore had been killed. His comrades were in the process of arming themselves when a white officer arrived with Baltimore. Maj. Snow assembled the men and warned them about taking action that they would regret. One of the men had a rifle hidden and he fired a shot and yelled that there was a white mob shooting at them. The blacks mutinied and armed themselves. 155 men, led by a Sgt. Vida Henry, marched into Houston. They fired at any houses with lights on. They fired at cars. The HPD cops were poorly organized and outgunned so encounters led to the deaths of 5 policemen. Things turned when some of the blacks fired on a car killing a National Guard officer. This caused the soldiers to realize they had crossed a line. They went back to the camp. Outside the camp, Henry committed suicide. The men turned themselves in. The movie was correct that 63 soldiers were charged with murder and 58 were found guilty. 41 were given life with hard labor and 13 were hanged, including Baltimore.

 

100 BEST WAR MOVIES #8. Waltz with Bashir (2008)

 

            Writer, director, and producer Ari Folman spent four years creating what he calls an “animated documentary”.  The movie has the look of a rotoscope film, but it actually was done with Adobe Flash cut-outs and classical animation.  It won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film and the Critics’ Choice award in the same category. It was the first animated film to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. It appeared on many top ten lists by critics. The film is autobiographical.  Folman takes as his theme the effects of war on memory. He was also interested in portraying the mental and physical damages war causes. Most of the men interviewed in the film suffered from PTSD.

 The movie begins with a jaw-dropping three-dimensionally animated scene of a pack of dogs running through the streets to a man’s apartment building.  The dogs represent a memory flashback for a friend of Ari.  The friend tells Ari each dog represented the 26 dogs he sniped during the Lebanon War of 1982.  This conversation causes Ari to confront the fact that he has holes in his memory of his experiences in Lebanon.  That very night he has his first flashback which involves himself and some naked comrades coming ashore on a beach at the city of Beirut.  Another friend theorizes that people sometimes fill in gaps in their memory with fiction.  He encourages Ari to try to fill in those gaps with the truth.  Don’t fear opening those doors, “memory takes us where we want to go”.  He assures Ari he cannot get hurt by learning the truth. This was also a message that the Israeli viewers should hav

            Ari goes on a quest to talk to comrades he served with and other veterans of the 1982 Lebanon War.  Their individual stories are vignettes that powerfully depict the nature of modern war.  Several universal truths about warfare and young soldiers shine through.  The adrenalin-fueled fear in a firefight is followed by the overwhelming silence of death.  Soldiers tend to fire their weapons at nothing and nowhere when traveling through enemy territory.  Soldiers are clueless pawns of the brass and the pols.  Surviving members of a unit suffer guilt feelings.  Unlike some anti-war movies, “Waltz with Bashir” does not glamorize the appealing aspects of armed combat.

            The flashbacks to the war and Ari’s quest to regain his memory build to the infamous   Ari’s unit is sent into western Beirut after the assassination of the Christian Phalange leader Bashir Gemayal.  The film takes its title from an incident in which a member of Ari’s unit waltzes with a machine gun in the middle of a Beirut street while under fire from snipers and RPGs and as Lebanese civilians spectate.  Time seems to stand still as he twirls amidst the bullet casings and ricochets.  The dance symbolizes Israel’s relationship with Bashir. Another soldier has his entire tank crew killed, but he swims back to his own lines. The movie includes a controversial porn scene where off duty soldiers watch an x-rated movie on a VCR. That is certainly something that happened in the war and other wars since the invention of videotapes.

            The film concludes with the Israeli Defensive Forces allowing vengeance-minded Christian Phalange militia to enter the Muslim camps.  The individual Israeli soldiers exhibit cognitive dissonance as they are slow to grasp what is clearly taking place before their eyes, abetted by their lighting the night skies with flares.  It takes three days for an Israeli general to order a stop to the killings.  The movie makes it clear that the Israeli government (Defense Minister Sharon and Prime Minister Begin) was complicit in the massacre, but Folman is not on a crusade.  He lets the audience connect the dots.  The memory theme comes full circle as Ari realizes that he had filled in the black hole of his memory of being near the atrocity by imagining that he and his comrades were instead at a beach.  The movie closes with real footage of the massacre victims as though to remind the audience that although animated, the story is true.

HISTORICAL ACCURACY:  The movie is set in the Second Invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The Israeli government had its fill of PLO attacks, so the army was sent in to clear them out of southern Lebanon. Israel was hoping to install a Christian government headed by Bashir Gemayel. The invasion met strong opposition, but the army reached Beirut. The PLO was forced to leave Lebanon after a ceasefire was negotiated. But creating a Christian government was impossible. The assassination of Gemayel ended that dream. Then the massacre in the refugee camps caused outrage, including in the Israeli public. The massacre in the Sabra neighborhood and the Shatila refugee camp occurred from Sept. 16-18. The killing was done by a Christian militia. From 1,300-3,500 people were killed. The Israeli military did not kill anyone, but it kept people from fleeing the area and fired flares at night to illuminate the areas. The government learned about the war crime, but it took three days for it to order a halt. The movie does not dig deep into the role of the government, but it is clear that the army and the government looked the other way when the massacre occurred. The scandal was one factor in forcing the army to withdraw to an area along the Israeli border. An investigation led to the resignation of the defense minister Ariel Sharon. (He appears in the film receiving a call from a respected reporter and yet he does nothing.)

ACTING:   N/A                

ACTION:   A  (not much, but realistic)

ACCURACY:  A      

PLOT:  A                

REALISM:   A

CINEMATOGRAPHY:   A+

SCORE:   A

SCENE:  the sniper waltz

QUOTE:  Folman:   After the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, I lost my memory. Now in order to remember, I am looking for those who can never forget.

            I love war movies because I love Military History.  I have been attracted to war stories since I was a child because of the action, but also because war brings out all the emotions and character traits in human beings.  I prefer war movies that have action and are true to human nature.  They don’t have to be historically accurate, but I insist they not be ridiculous and unrealistic.  When you have seen as many war films as I have, you also are impressed when the movie takes a different approach to telling a war story.  “Waltz with Bashir” fits this description (as do “300” and “Oh! What a Lovely War”).  Movies like these prove that although the war movie genre (starting with “Birth of a Nation”) is almost a century old, there are still new ways to tell a war story.

            Although I have not considered documentaries when I came up with the 100 best war movies, I made an exception for this movie. When I first saw it, it did not realize that the director referred to it as an animated documentary. The Academy Awards, as well as other movie organizations, treated it as a movie, so I have some support for my including it on a list of war movies. “Waltz” looks very different from every other war film I have seen.  Folman uses a variety of animation.  The movie is mostly a blend of cut-out and classic animation.  It is influenced by graphic novels and has a scene reminiscent of Japanese anime.  He includes some three-dimensional scenes, but used the technique sparingly and only for spectacular shots.  His use of color varies depending on the mood of the scene.  The war scenes tend to be monochromatic.  The home front scenes are much more vibrant.  (He makes the point that although he was fighting only twenty minutes away, at home the public was unaffected by the war and life went on as usual.)  The shading and shadows are amazing.  The look is mesmerizing.  Blu-ray was made for movies like this.

            The movie is true to human nature mainly because these are real people who Ari interviewed and built the story on.  From my reading of men in combat, I have a good idea of how men behave under that stress.  For those vast majority of people who do not want to read extensively in this difficult area, movies can serve the purpose of educating civilians about what their young warriors go through.  This is important because these young men deserve to be understood.  Civilians need second-hand memory.  Undoubtedly, some Israelis were offended by what they saw in “Waltz”.  The fact is atrocities happen on both sides in every war.  Good war movies like this show what really happens in war, but also provide the why.