Yes and yes. I didn’t realize RKG-3s were as big as what the kid was carrying. He did have a shooting, IIRC, where the circumstances weren’t as cut and dried.
No, two different issues. But it shows that people are bringing their own baggage to the movie.
The vox comment is because you are using someone’s opinion article to state something as a fact. You are entitled to your opinion. So is that writer I’ve never heard of from a website I’ve barely heard of. It doesn’t make it fact.
I thought the author, using actual scenes from the movie compared to history as it actually happened, made a good case that it qualified as propaganda.It’s an opinion article with factual research behind it. Apparently this is just dismissed as another “opinion” by you, so I ask you: What would qualify as evidence in your mind that this movie is propaganda?
So it’s never ok to kill anyone no matter what the circumstances. Gotcha.
Interesting news story on abcnews.go.com from the real Seal who trained Chris Kyle.
Titled “What ‘American Sniper’ Got Right and Wrong, According to SEAL Who Helped Train Chris Kyle”.
This was the Seal who trained Chris Kyle - the real sniper - not Bradley Cooper the actor who played Chris Kyle in the movie.
Isn’t that exactly what propaganda is? Biased or misleading information to make a particular political point?
So if someone makes a movie staged during the Iraq War they must mention out of obligation that the war was illegitimate?
Otherwise, it is propaganda.
Not exactly. Americans discovered the war was based on lies, and “illegitimate” as you say, so what could they do? They put “support our troops” bumper stickers on their cars as a way of avoiding the subject and shutting down conversation. Forget the war, if you don’t support the troops you’re just-like-Hitler. So what’s the point of this movie? We don’t want to get all depressed about an illegitimate war, and we need to glorify something about the war to make it worth it. We need to find something to make us feel good. What do we choose? A guy who thinks killing savages is fun.
Anyway, here’s another article I ran across today about the movie’s accuracy,from Slate.
Lot of dumb comments here, Platoon never explores the pretense of going into the Vietnam war, so I guess that’s a propaganda movie? You know, one of the most deeply anti-war movies made? Hurt Locker is certainly not propaganda and doesn’t explore the root causes of the Iraq war, either. Saying that something “must do x” or it “is propaganda” simply trite and stupidly formulaic.
FWIW as someone who has seen the movie in theaters (because I see all Best Picture nominees, sometimes I want on the video release, though), it’s a poorly done film (probably 3rd or 4th time I’ve said that), but “propaganda”, I don’t see that. It isn’t glorifying the Iraq war, or George Bush. Kyle does spout off a lot about how we have to fight in Iraq or they’d be coming to America, but while that view is never club-me-over-the-head challenged, it’s kind of left to hang in a way that I think most people view it as “wow, this guy is a dolt but a true believer.” The movie is about glorifying Chris Kyle, the man, but propaganda is about advancing some political cause with a one-sided narrative about some issue of political relevance. I can’t see a movie like this as propaganda. It’d be like calling Lincoln Union propaganda just because the movie doesn’t hit certain criticisms or critiques that you could make. Propaganda is deliberate and intentional, not all stories that don’t analyze every narrative about something “must” be propaganda.
As for people “cheering” for kills, I genuinely doubt that is widespread. Wasn’t anything like that in not only my theater but any number of theaters I’ve been in during my life when I’ve watched war movies or any other movie. I suspect it’s very much something people are possibly just making up or hugely exaggerating. Just because someone heard a redneck scream in a movie doesn’t mean you’re observing some cultural bloodlust exploding all over the United States.
Anyway, a film as a work of art has to be judged irrespective of how people react to it, if people rioted in the street over Schindler’s List that wouldn’t affect how I’d judge the film.
I saw Platoon about a week or so before leaving for basic training. I didn’t read any particular message in Platoon other than war is hell, and that was potentially what I was getting myself into.
I mean the movie shows in depth the degeneration of the American military in Vietnam, rape, drug use, murder of soldiers by other soldiers. Plus the director is Oliver Stone, his feelings on the Vietnam war and the messages he’s tried to convey about it through his movies is pretty established. But the movie doesn’t denounce the Tonkin Gulf Resolution or Johnson’s decision to start the war, so by the estimation of some it’s a pro-War propaganda film.
To the former, that’s not really true–the fact that the war is unpopular, controversial and of moral dubiousness is a major theme of the film, and the way it was tearing at our protagonist (and by extension, our country) is a predominant metaphor. That alone, makes it a more honest film than something like The Green Berets or to a lesser degree, We Were Soldiers.
As for the latter, propaganda weights all its artistic choices slanting in one direction. The Bigelow film doesn’t do that–there are a lot more innocent Iraqi civilians than terrorists in the film, the job of the “hero” is glamorized through his work ethic and dedication, not in the results (which are often seen as small in the face of the resistance the insurgents provide). That alone provides a context that is balanced–not demonizing the army, but also not pretending that what we were doing there was just or honorable.
No, that’s not being asserted at all. The issue was that the film brings up 9/11 without bringing up Bush, Saddam, etc., so that invites a false conclusion to the reasons behind the war. There’s no reason at all that the film should create this connection unless it wants to assert a certain point of view about the conflict and the reason our soldiers are in harm’s way.
If you want to make that connection–in my view of the movie Eastwood doesn’t make Kyle seem “right” in his linking of 9/11 to the Iraq war.
Propaganda is designed to influence a populace’s position, I don’t think there is anything said or done in American Sniper that take a big position on the larger question of the Iraq war at all. I think instead people who go into it are going to come out with the same view they went into the movie with, it in no way challenges any narrative as to why the war happened or whether it was justified. It’s a glory movie built around the Cult of Chris Kyle, but it’s not propaganda.
I won’t see it now. Sounds like Clint didn’t make one of the better movies about the Second Iraq War. So far, that is still Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha
(But Clint still made the best movie about the Grenada operation. Not that it was a crowded field)
Everything I hear about it reminds me of the film they were showing in Inglourious Basterds. That’s not a happy comparison.
But the movie is not about the Iraq War. It’s about a guy who served in the Iraq War. You are imparting political baggage that is not important to the narrative.
If Chris Kyle believed in the cause of fighting to defend his country, then an honest movie would reflect that. Just as an honest movie about Hitler would reflect his perspective that Jews were traitors and Communists were evil. It would be dishonest to impart your beliefs on what is essentially a biopic. The audience can do that for themselves.
People – if you want to debate the Iraq war, please to do so in Great Debates. We’re talking about movies here.
Thanks,
twickster, Cafe Society moderator
Saying exactly that is what got Michael Moore a FUC_ YOU MICHAEL MOORE sign being held by Sarah Palin - Sarah Palin's Got Michael Moore In The Crosshairs | Crooks and Liars
I’m actually laughing at the claim that American Sniper is “propoganda”.
No shit, how many if any war movies aren’t “propoganda films”.
Platoon, Coming Home, the Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket, Saving Private Ryan.
They were all propoganda films and respectfully anyone who thinks differently is being silly.
FTR, I haven’t seen the movie and have immediate plans to see it.