Ouch. Just finished watching 1988’s Rambo III on cable, in which Sylvester Stallone singlehandedly drives the Russian army out of Afghanistan.
Aside from the obvious bullshit factor, the movie makes me cringe for the portrayal of the Afghans, and that’s not even taking Sept. 11 into account. At the end of the movie, Rambo gives the spunky Mujahaddin kid the jade Buddha pendant Rambo picked up in the previous movie from a Vietnamese woman who died almost immediately afterward. I’m left thinking “okay, kid, enjoy your good-luck charm, but don’t let the Taliban see it or they’re beat the crap out of you.”
The closing title: “This film is dedicated to the gallant people of Afghanistan” doesn’t help.
It got me thinking about other movies whose politics seemed incredibly wrong-headed just a few years after release, and not just because of ethnic stereotyping. Any suggestions?
The Sixth Day. Its entire message was “Clones are People, too!”, seemingly anticipating hordes of cloned humans coming out of their little vats within a couple years.
In one of the Roger Moore *“Bond” films, there is a scene in which some mujahideen show up late (fully armed for battle), one of them says something like, “We had a little trouble getting thru the airport.” Just seems kinda creepy now.
*I don’t feel like looking it up on IMDB, but it’s the one with Joe Don Baker as the bad guy.
How about The Seige where terrorist suicide bombers attack new york until finally the Army is called in…no
How about The Peacemaker where terrorists steal a bunch of nuclear weapons…no thats not it
Actually, I can remember a couple of movies like Gung Ho (Michael Keaton), Black Rain (Michael Douglas) and Rising Sun (Snipes/Connary) where the backdrop was Japans economic might and ruthless business tactics. Oooo!!! The Japanese are buying up America! Of course with the Asian markets where they are now, these movies seem a little silly and dated.
SPOILERS
Crusoe - You are correct. Simon (Jerremy Irons) was the brother of Hans Grubber (Alan Rikman) from Die Hard I. Both used the MO of using terrorist attacks to cover massive thefts.
Okay, RED DAWN is one of my favorite movies. SO I feel I must defend it against ignorance.
Number 1. The High School kids do not fight the WHOLE Russian army. They are essentially local terrorists who the local commander (A Cuban) can’t seem to hunt down and stop from bombing installations and making hit and run attacks on supply convoys. Not that Far fetched is it? If it were easy to take out small terrorist cells, wouldn’t the political situation be alot different in say… Israel, Afghaistan, etc.
You must also remember that the majority of the Wolverines! are killed by the end of the movie once the Russians see them as more than a nuisance.
Number 2. If memory serves (I seem to always catch this movie at the parachute drop when it is aired on TV so I might be wrong about this part) there is a text prologue explaining that the economic and/or agricultural situation in Canada and Mexico is in dire straights. So the Western Hemisphere has become ‘slightly’ unstable. Cuba has invaded Mexico? And possibly the USSR has taken parts of Canada?
Regardless, the prologue establishes that this movie isn’t a “IT COULD HAPPEN TOMORROW!” style propaganda piece. Sure it was propaganda, but a movie like AMERIKA is a better example of that.
It sure is easy to look at these movies through the “20/20” hindsight of history.
Okay, RED DAWN is one of my favorite movies. SO I feel I must defend it against ignorance.
Number 1. The High School kids do not fight the WHOLE Russian army. They are essentially local terrorists who the local commander (A Cuban) can’t seem to hunt down and stop from bombing installations and making hit and run attacks on supply convoys. Not that Far fetched is it? If it were easy to take out small terrorist cells, wouldn’t the political situation be alot different in say… Israel, Afghaistan, etc.
You must also remember that the majority of the Wolverines! are killed by the end of the movie once the Russians see them as more than a nuisance.
Number 2. If memory serves (I seem to always catch this movie at the parachute drop when it is aired on TV so I might be wrong about this part) there is a text prologue explaining that the economic and/or agricultural situation in Canada and Mexico is in dire straights. So the Western Hemisphere has become ‘slightly’ unstable. Cuba has invaded Mexico? And possibly the USSR has taken parts of Canada?
Regardless, the prologue establishes that this movie isn’t a “IT COULD HAPPEN TOMORROW!” style propaganda piece. Sure it was propaganda, but a movie like AMERIKA is a better example of that.
It sure is easy to look at these movies through the “20/20” hindsight of history.
That’s why I started this thread. Weren’t you paying attention?
Scary computer movies are always good for a laugh. Matthew Broderick using 8" floppy diskettes and an audio coupler modem in WarGames had me chuckling, since neither of these items were cutting edge even when I saw the movie in 1983.
Actually, some of the characters were terrorists, some were robbers. The robbers were using the terrorists to steal all the gold (Remember, one of the terrorists was rather upset when he found out about that…).
I actually thought it was kinda funny when Bruce Willis’s character was talking to one of the terrorists/robbers who was disguised as a city civil engineer. To paraphrase: “Yeah, you were probably here for that whole World Trade Center business, weren’t you? That had to be a mess.” (I’m surely going to burn in hell for that… ).
And actually, I think The Siege is probably even more ‘on-topic’ now, for a lack of a better phrase. Remember, one of the main elements of the movie was against such things as restricting constitutional rights and specifically targeting muslim citizens…
And, if IIRC, the area in the movie took place in wasn’t too far from US held territory.
They said the Russians/Cubans came up through Mexico(or something like that), came up the great plains, but are held at the Rockies and the Mississippi by US military/national guard forces. The east and west coasts are still in US hands.
Red Dawn takes place in Colorado, so it could be said that perhaps the wolverines were harrassing an out of the way base.
OK, I give up. Red Dawn was the very picture of realism. Like when the paratroopers land at the beginning and start their conquest of America by shooting up a high school! :rolleyes:
2010 was a crappy movie anyway. 2001 had originality, realism (in the phyiscs department, anyway), and while it showed a bit of contention with the Russians (upset because one of thier ships was denied emergency landing at clavius), it doesn’t mean the cold war was still on in 2001. 2010 was an horrid attempt at a sequel by using the Star Wars style of space flight and a stupid Cold War takeoff (which isn’t in the book). In the book, they do worry about a Chinese Ship, The Tsien, but only because they are worried about them getting to the discovery first and claiming the salvage rights, IIRC.
Hrm, i can’t believe noone has pointed this out yet but
contrary to popular opinion, the taliban did not drive the soviets out of afghanistan! If anyone did that it was what is now called the Northern Alliance
The last soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989 after peace accords in geneva, leaving behind a communist goverment under Naijibullah that would soon be toppled in 1992 by Mujahideen under Professor Burhannudin Rabbani, but the central govermnet in Kabul wields little power over local warlords like Dostum, who is still in power today as an allie of the US. The Taliban militia was formed by radical student Mullah Omar in 1994 and gained control of Kabul ( i don’t think anyone ever gained control of the entire country) in 1996. Troops loyal to the old Mujahideen goverment and warlords at odds with the Taliban(most of the veterans of the anti soviet war) establish a resistance to the north, eventually under the leadership of Ahmed Shah Massoud(a principle leader of the anti soviet mujahideen and the only one to have won a real battle against them) calling themselves the United Front. Pakistani intelligence, which supported the taliban, refeered to these as the “Northern alliance”.
Not all of the above is completely acurate and there are a lot of generalizations, but it’s jsut what i can pull out of my head right now.
Well, as the only person in this thread to even mention the Taliban, I feel compelled to point out that I didn’t say the Taliban drove out the Soviets, but that the movie indicates John Rambo did, albeit with a lot sweating and grunting and some extremely impressive exploding arrows capable of destroying Russia helicopters.
Well, Colonel Trautman helped a little.
My point was that Rambo gives the mandatory spunky kid a jade Buddha pendant at the end of the movie, and within a few years the Taliban would be severely beating people for trivial offenses, one of which (I assume) is wearing a symbol of Buddhism. Way to win your freedom, mandatory spunky kid!
Getting back on topic, there have been a whole bunch of forgettable movies (I’d give some titles, but I forgot them) and a recent episode of TV’s Dark Angel that show no-holds-barred pit fighting as being a spectator sport for tuxedo-wearing ultra-rich people and conducted in secret warehouses and basements and crap like that. The reality of pit fighting is lots of advertising, video-game spinoffs, pay-per-view, and an audience made up mostly of blue-collar slobs.
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