Suppose They Gave a War Movie and Nobody Came?
Jeremy Renner in Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq themed The Hurt Locker
That’s what it’s been like recently for movies that have anything to do with Iraq. The question is: are audiences truly leery of movies about Iraq or are they just waiting for a good one?
According to THR’s Steven Zeitchik, the next crop of war films seems to be distancing itself from the conflict altogether. He quotes Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker producer Nic Chartier as saying her film is an action movie, not an Iraq movie. “This could have been the British and the IRA. It could have been anywhere, really,” he says.
Meanwhile, reporting from Venice in that inimitably annoying Varietese, Nick Vivarelli, calls Bigelow’s film a “high-adrenalin bomb squad actioner” that “gave the Lido a jolt and proposed itself as the Iraq pic that might break through to American auds.”
In the pages of Screen Daily, Fionnuala Halligan says the lack of a name cast might limit the film’s box office prospects though she’s mostly positive in the review saying “Bigelow crafts here a barrage of individual set pieces of great, often heart-stopping tension, but they don’t quite add up as a whole and, towards the end, almost strain against the central impetuous of the film.”
Based on the experiences of journalist Mark Boal, The Hurt Locker tells the story of a bomb disposal squad working the streets of Baghdad. Jeremy Renner (28 Weeks Later), Brian Geraghty and Anthony Mackie star with support from Ralph Fiennes and Guy Pearce.
[UPDATE: Variety's Derek Elley rings in with a less-than-positive review: "Often gripping at a straight thriller level, but increasingly weakened by its fuzzy (and hardly original) psychology..."]
Filed under: Buzz
Tags: Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Guy Pearce, Jeremy Renner, Kathryn Bigelow, Ralph Fiennes, The Hurt Locker
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We’ll know The Surge has truly worked when films even remotely about Iraq have nothing to fear at the box office.
God, Variety speak makes me ill.
“are audiences truly leery of movies about Iraq or are they just waiting for a good one?”
A bit of both, I think. Clearly, the war is not at all at the forefront of anyone’s mind these days, not even the media’s. Kind of ridiculous. So partly the lack of interest is due to exhaustion (the war being in its 6th year with little hope for a quick end), and part of it, I admit, is because of the movies (over 120 of them) have just been bad.
I actually approached this same question on the 5th anniversary of the war, just a few weeks before Stop-Loss came out, which I now consider the best non-documentary film about Iraq. It wasn’t perfect, but it was just so much better than any of the other fictionalized productions I’ve seen, which includes everything but Redacted.
I remember that excellent post Daniel. I wasn’t as enthusiastic about Stop-Loss, but it doesn’t have a lot of competition, at least among the films I’ve seen.
I caught American Son at LAFF and I think I liked it better than Stop-Loss, but it hasn’t been released yet.
I was firmly in the waiting-for-a-good-one camp, but I’ve ceased to believe that. We’re a nation of self-absorbed hedonists most of whom were never asked to sacrifice anything and we resent this ongoing war because it is a boring drag, a downer that interrupts our daily breaking celebrigossip news with tiresome suicide bombings and car bombings and the bleak monochromatic images of sand covered Arabs and armed forces that are a real buzz kill and because it fills our movie theaters with more of the same heavy guilt-inducing messages we like totally get already instead of a nice, fun slasher pic and can’t we just get along and watch American Idol in peace?*
*This in no way reflects my own opinion of the war, rather just the misanthropic mood I seem to be in today.
Wow, someone got up on the eloquently cranky side of the bed today! I like it.
Along the same lines as what you’re saying, many people don’t want to be challenged, either thematically or artistically. Movies are an escape from pesky thinking. It’s sad, but there it is.
I don’t know. While I think there is a significant amount of the population that wants to pretend the Iraq war doesn’t exist, to the point that any film in that setting will never be a megahit, I still think it’s entirely possible for an Iraq film to be a modest hit. The problem is that most of them haven’t been good enough to reach that modest hit status. Case in point, HBO’s Generation Kill is easily the best dramatization of the conflict that’s been made, and while it wasn’t gangbusters in the ratings, it did do decent numbers and was by no means a failure.
Ugh, I am not interested in seeing war movies right now, to be honest, but I still want to see Stop Loss.
Yeah I’ve been wondering about American Son - didn’t it play at Sundance? - for a while, but see no sign of it on the horizon.
Nick I think you might like Stop-Loss. Surprised it hasn’t made its way out there yet.
The SA film scene is in crisis, and that’s not eve me being dramatic, it’s the truth.
It looks like American Son is supposed to play here on 9/20, but not at a regular LA theater. It’s kind of far away. Strange.
I agree with alynch on this one. Not one of the Iraq-related films so far have been good (and this is coming from someone who usually LIKES these kinds of films). Their main problem has been that they put message before story, and the film suffers for it. If any film can break this, it will be Paul Greengrass’ THE GREEN ZONE. He’s been good at not only handling touchy subjects (United 93) but also at sneaking in a little bit of message without overwhelming the story (Bourne Ultimatum). BODY OF LIES could do similar, but it’s far less connected to Iraq and is more or less a spy thriller while TGZ is a bonafide war film.
Yeah, the lack of quality is kind of my unspoken opinion, though a certain Iraq fatigue doesn’t help.
I hope you’re right about Green Zone. I was surprised by U93 so hopefully Greengrass can deliver again.