Yanno, I was thinking of him specifically as one of the few who could possibly pull it off when I posted that.
the classic war movies had a clear sense of being “just” wars and so were very distinct about who were the good guys. i think we have lacked that clarity since Vietnam so any war movie raises questions about the motivations of “our” side. regarding re-makes of old films - the world has moved on, maybe cinema will cycle back to it when the super hero thing has been exhausted (that will happen, right?)
I would love to see a remake of In Harm’s Way. It is a deeply flawed movie but I still love it. Maybe this time they won’t cast a block of wood as Rock’s son.
they are too busy making Spiderman 43 and Star Wars 26 and Batman 98
They could make an update of the veterans-returning-home-to-their-womenfolk, ‘The Best Years of Our Lives’ I suppose, but it wouldn’t be hardly the same. :eek: different times, different veterans and women, too. A strict remake set in dubya dubya two would be a real period piece, like knights in days of old. … no, wouldn’t fly at all. Shooting, blasting, and explosions are still popular things men like to see, but they’re in videogames now.
They did this for TV back in the '70s. It was called Coming Home, and it was an unmitigated piece of crap. Billy Dee Williams was the male lead’s co-pilot during the war (pure fantasy; the only blacks to fly then were the Redtails, who were all fighter pilots). The latter got into a fight over his boss’s overt racism, not because an America Firster mocked Homer’s prostheses. The Virginia Mayo role was played by the luscious Sherry Jackson, who was a '70s-sytle “liberated” career woman rather than a golddigging floozy.
The original is one of my all-time favorite movies. It deservedly won seven Academy Awards in 1946, including Best Picture. I was amazed at how Hollywood can take something so good and thoroughly fuck it up.
Why remake a movie about an old war when we seem to have an endless supply of new wars?
Because the plot is much more convoluted.
I think you have the wrong film. Coming Home (1978) takes place during the Vietnam War, and stars Jane Fonda, Jon Voight, and Bruce Dern.
And Liam Neeson would be the actor to replace John Wayne, but it would be a very different telling of the story indeed.
My mistake. It was Returning Home (1975). I saw it a year or so later, when I was living in England.
Hah! Look at that: Tom Selleck **and **Dabney Coleman were both in it, as was Whitney Blake, from ***Hazel ***and One Day at a Time. And the black guy wasn’t Billy Dee, he just kind of looked like him with the 'stache and all.
Cut me some slack here, it’s been more than 40 freakin’ years! 
“Saving Private Ryan” dramatically changed the audience’s expectation of war films.
There had been brutal and uncompromising war films before that, but “Saving Private Ryan” elevated brutal and uncompromising to new levels of horrible realism. It’s been almost twenty years so it’s easy to forget how stomach churning the movie was; it’s still sickening to watch at times, deliberately so.
Such war movies as have been critically successful since then, like “Letters from Iwo Jima” or “The Hurt Locker” have been those that consciously imitated the attention to visual realism SPR started. War movies, to be great movies, have been kind of reset, if you will. If you wanted to redo a lot of war movies you’d have to really amp up the violence and terror, to the point that you’d be making a substantially different movie, and at some risk, because war movies won’t make the kind of dough another comic book movie will - but they are expensive.
There’s always Game of Thrones.
spoiler: The Americans don’t win
I don’t think a movie that vilifies the Japanese would be hard to sell in China. “Hey China, remember when we helped you kick Japan’s ass? Yeah, that was awesome.”
Windtalkers was a bad movie on its own. When you compare it’s cartoon violence and action to Saving Private Ryan it looks even worse. You are absolutely right about the bar being raised
I’ve occasionally wondered whether you could make a decent big-budget war movie out of the Falklands war. It had everything from bayonet fighting to submarines, and the only (I think) combat deployment of Harrier jump jets.
I’m not sure if it would be globally popular, but the raw material is there.
Didn’t they already decide to go with “Trigger”?
I saw approximately two minutes of that movie and found it comically terrible. Two minutes was all I needed to see.
I found “Hacksaw Ridge” closer to “Windtalkers,” to be honest. I understood Gibson was trying to make a serious war film but the battle scenes still had a cartoonish element to them, even though they were very gory and violent. Eastwood did a much better job with his Iwo Jima films.
USMC AV-8B Harrier IIs were used in the Gulf War.
Wouldn’t “Digger” be a better name for a dog 