Who here has seen the movie Rules of Engagement? I believe it starred Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones. The premise of the movie is that there’s a riot in Yemen, in which a U.S. embassy is attacked… Jackson, who controls a squad of troops sent in to keep the peace, orders the troops to open fire on the protesters and they’re all killed. Then the rest of the movie is spent at a trial to determine whether or not the attack was murder, because only Jackson could see the protesters firing weapons from his vantage point during the incident.
Now, I didn’t think much of it while watching it in a small New York theatre, but I recently rented it on DVD along with Three Kings. Perhaps it’s because of the recent attacks on Afghanistan, but I thought that the movie was extremely stereotypical of Arabs. A video capturing the protest shows all of the protesters, including the women and children, pulling out weaponry(Rifles and handguns) and shooting at the United States troops. When Tommy Lee Jones is travelling through the streets of Yemen, everyone he meets hates him because he’s American. The police in that country are corrupt, having moved all the weapons from the dead bodies, and the protesters are all portrayed as religious zealots. All in all, it really struck me as- even if not meant- disgustingly racist.
I didn’t particularly care for the premise of the movie. High-up-military guy has videotaped evidence that the US guy acted “correctly” but he destroys it so we avoid a scandal? Seems pretty thin.
I don’t actually recall the women having weapons. I believe the armed men were using the women with babies as human shields. Hence the problem. Shooting armed men trying to kill you is within the “Rules of Engagement” while firing into a crowd is rather problematic.
Having never been to Yemen, I don’t know how accurate the portrayal is. However, after a major incident in which US Marines slaughtered a crowd, do you really think the population would be happy to see an American?
Corrupt police? It was kinda necessary to the plot. If the weapons didn’t disappear the whole thing is kinda moot, right? If AK-47s are strewn about the street the marines did the right thing. And I have no idea how corrupt the Yemeni police are, but it’s entirely possible that they have enough anti-american feelings (again after a massacre) to look the other way.
And anyway, they made the US Ambassador look like a corrupt ungrateful prick, the secretary or whoever burned the tape as an evil corrupt villian, the marines didn’t come across very well, Samual is a brutal “get the job done” type, and Jones is an alcoholic. It’s not just the Yemenis.
Haven’t seen Three Kings, so can’t comment on that one.
I was going to bring it up, but I thought I should just end with the question. In my view, Three Kings was not really racist at all. I won’t spoil the plot for you since you haven’t seen it, but it didn’t seem too wrong for most of the people to have guns- After all, there were a lot of Saddam’s troops, and revolutionaries.
I saw it in the cinema. It was a pretty good film, well-structured and with a decent depth of character, but it was clearly 100% Grade-A propaganda.
I think we all understand that Hollywood does that, though. Fifteen years ago it was the Russians, now it’s the Arabs. As long as you understand that you’re dealing with caricatures, it’s not all that harmful, IMHO. Maybe that’s what the film ratings should be for nowadays. Not whether or not a kid is old enough to see Rocky bring down Communism with one punch - but whether his parents have had enough of a chance to teach him how to interpret what he sees on screen.
I’m reminded of a passage in Alan Spence’s Its Colours They Are Fine (short stories about growing up in a savagely sectarian 1950s Glasgow), wherein two little boys discuss a war movie they’ve seen. One is going on at great length about how impressed he was when the American hero finally killed the evil communist bad guy. His pal points out the boy’s own father is a communist, to which the boy replies, “Aye, I didnae understaun that bit either. But ah didnae bother. It wis a great fillum.”
Extremely thin, at the risk of SPOILERS the entire premise of the movie is that Samuel might have had just a tad of justification in shooting at the crowd as indicated by the analyist talking in the begining. But later we see that the tape is outright vindication of his actions and makes the ‘villain’ look like an idiot and ruins the premise of the movie.