My Favorite Antiwar Movies

Perhaps the best film to take on the problem of war at its very core: The Military-Industrial Complex.

Most other films take the tack of showcasing the internalized mythos of war. It's important to realize that this mythos is groomed and cultivated by economic interests, on the backs of the internalizee suckers. Very important.

There is little I can say that hasn't been said a million times about this film.

Though I will add this: In a short, advanced ESL intro to Strangelove, I said: "The script is both realistic and comedic. It sounds like it was written by a team of military experts, psychologists, English professors, and drunken schoolboys."

I stand by every word of that sentence.

The only thing you really need to know about this movie, up front, is that the director (Errol Morris) nailed the documentary subject of the century when he got Robert S. McNamara to sit in front of his Interrotron.

If you have any interest in modern American history whatsoever you will see this movie, or languish for not having seen it

Yes, Paths of Glory is an important movie. But Breaker Morant achieves the same effects, with significantly less affectedness.

Less is made in the animated feature of Gen's family's antiwar sentiments (than in the original comic stories), but the message is still strong: Life is sacred, and war is an insane, self-inflicted denial of our unspoken contract with life.

A lot of the tepid response to War, Inc. was, I think, due to the fact that Americans didn't recognize themselves in that flick.

As is the case with all prophesy: Prophets are without honor in their own countries, and that's really only natural. Heartfelt response to prophesy is, after all, a supernatural event.

OK, OK, OK: The flick is also a bit of an aesthetic garage sale. I admit that. But America needs to recognize itself in the wares on display in this film.

Artistically, a bit dated; with choppy pacing, writing that occasionally sags, and some lackluster acting.

But it committed the stunning sin of encouraging period postwar moviegoers to reflect on the U.S. State Department turnabout that formed the basis for the Cold War status quo, in which Germany was now to be our new bestest buddy, and our erstwhile ally, Russia, was now our greatest global nemesis.

Didn't George Orwell have something to say about that?

Sorry, people-who-thought-it-was-a-simultaneously-dim-and-impenetrable-failed-comedy-flick.

It was meant as an expressionistic dark romp over the terrain which is America's failure to come to terms with its own dark desire; to stay "on top", geopolitically, without actually having to create something of real value to our fellow human beings.

And yet, in the midst of all this frogging about in the mire of our self-deluded self-perception, there shines out a glimmer of sacred light: The moment when Clooney apologizes, from a deep place in his earnest heart.

Really: Can you actually get more "antiwar" than that?

Some will say this is not an antiwar movie, but I disagree. The film has a lot to say about the media as a vital antecedent of warmaking, and the book is even more focused on this complicity.

Nowhere does abuse of power draw feeling people into the fray--and successfully desensitize others--than when the state kills for geopolitical gain.

And the book and film are both quite convincing in their thesis that abuse of state power begins with the control of information; and the mechanisms of control in democratic societies are as deserving of deconstruction as those in totalitarian societies.

In fact, honest people who aspire to shepherding a decent society owe it to themselves and to their friends and neighbors to invest time and energy in thinking deeply on this issue, and then organizing to overcome the institutional inertia that drives the death machine into the future.

Ultimately, really, a searing, heartrending indictment of power.

It's not about geographic battlefields; it's about the mindset that attends power projection, and the fundamental lie that is needed to support that mindset.

I last saw this about 40 years ago.

Notable for having been written by Dalton Trumbo, who was blacklisted. Like the best antiwar movies, it's about the unending denial and lies that attend war.

Not a particularly effective deterrent to war, but lovingly written... by Buck Henry!; from the original Heller, of course.

The production values are incredible, and stand as a high-water mark against which future satires can be justly measured.

IMPORTANT: I'm not saying that Top Gun is an anti-war flick. I'm saying that it's a fantastic period artifact that perfectly captures the popular attitude toward American high-tech military superiority.

Particularly notable is the sense that the film conflates sex and high-tech war machines. This was at a time when Reagan was pitching his Star Wars missile shield boondoggle.

I feel about as confident of this as of anything: This was media collusion with the military-industrial complex to rewire our response centers to respond sexually to the idea of superior firepower.

I think Top Gun is essential viewing for people who want to see a sterling specimen of this kind of collusion.

IMDb contributor mysteriousturtle recommended this, so I obtained a copy and watched it.

It beats the living crap out of another noted made-for-TV post-nuclear-apocalypse flick, the U.S. production, "The Day After" with Jason Robards.

It really is about the blotting out of civilization that would surely attend an all-out nuclear exchange.

Catastrophe is heaped upon catastrophe, from the depiction of the survival conceits of officialdom, to the final, unspeakable dread hint of the faceless face of human extinction. And just about everything in between.

Yeah, it's (presumably) dated. But it's still an important Cold War document. Watch it, and get with the program.