1st Feline Battalion

07/03/2007: I’m sick and tired of all the sex and violence in today’s movies. I just want to see the violence!

After all, nothing ruins a perfectly good, bloody, gory kill flick like a steamy sex scene. And people who mix sex with violence are perverts.

And for those who enjoy non-stop violence, the Die Hard movies are perfect. From the first scene to the last yippie kiyay, Bruce Willis never disappoints.

His latest installment–Live Free or Die Hard–is no exception.

This one has a cyber-terror theme, and it is the kind that will leave you scratching your head. Sure, the scenarios are overinflated, as the premise of one person having sufficient knowledge and access and wherewithal to attack that many portions of our national infrastructure is unrealistic–and Willis incorporates more cartoon physics than the previous Die Hard movies–but Live Free or Die Hard will leave you wondering about some very important issues:

• The futility of your government. As America was slammed with a cyberterror attack, the federal response was realistically woeful. Just like 9/11. Just like Katrina. Fact is, government is good at playing mopup, but don’t expect rapid solutions to profound problems.

• The reality of evil among our citizenry. None of the attackers were Islammunists. They were not Chinese. They were not Russian. They were not idealogues. The ringleader was a jilted former programmer for the DoD. While the Die Hard scenario is not completely realistic, the evil that would motivate such a one to embark on that course is very real. History bears this out, giving us a litany of despots, kings, caesars, and various assortments of brutal autocrats who slaughtered millions of their own without compunction or regard for human dignity. Anyone who thinks they don’t exist in our government–and even our private sector–is smoking something I want legalized.

• If one watches this movie closely enough, one gets the impression that women aren’t taken to men who lack testicular fortitude. That dynamic between McClain and his daughter is very realistic, even if the scenario behind it is not.

All said, Live Free or Die Hard is the perfect stress-reliever to watch as you celebrate your Independence Day.

04/28/2006: In a politically-charged climate such as ours, it is easy to understand why making a movie about September 11 would be risky. To be fair, everybody has an opinion about what motivated the hijackers, and the effect of our post-9/11 strategy. Given the recent attempts by others to use the screen to advance political views, there is legitimate cause for concern over the potential for politicizing 9/11.

United 93 avoided that. As David Beamer–father of Flight 93 hero Todd Beamer–opined in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Hollywood got it right this time.

There is no political agenda in this movie.

A few notes about suitability: It would be a good movie for a family to see together. These are matters where healthy discussion is recommended, and the movie is good for that. The language is relatively clean, as the emphasis is not on salty language, but rather capturing the situation. There are a few F-bombs, and I counted one GD-bomb, but other than that it’s clean. There are some bloody scenes, but they are not overdone. This is not The Passion of the Christ or Saving Private Ryan. I do not, however, recommend it for pre-teens (except if the parents see it first). That’s a judgment call.

The movie is very stressful from the five-minute mark onward. One gets a close-up view of the difficulties faced by the air traffic controllers, the FAA, and our military. The directors capture the extreme hardships faced by multiple levels of command in even understanding what was going on, as things were unfolding very rapidly.

Keep in mind that the first plane–American Airlines Flight 11–hit the North tower at about 8:45 AM. At 10:03 AM–a mere 78 minutes later–United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in Shanksville, PA. In between that time, flights hit the South Tower and the Pentagon. While all that is transpiring, there are thousands of planes in the air (each one a blip on the screen for which controllers are responsible for maintaining adequate separation from the other blips), and even the suspect flights were tough to discern as hijackings.

Imagine trying to interpret such ambiguous data under the pressure that the military, FAA, and air traffic controllers were experiencing.

United 93 captures that in spectacular fashion!

Enter the heroes of United Flight 93.

Thanks to cellular (and air-phone) technology, the passengers learned that two jets had hit the World Trade Center and one had hit the Pentagon.

Given that your plane has been hijacked, and knowing that three buildings have been hit, what would you do?

Compounding matters, one of the hijackers is wearing what appears to be a bomb.

Now what would you do?

Had they been resigned to their fate, done nothing, and United 93 hit Capitol Hill or the White House, no one would fault the passengers for staying put. They were under no moral obligation to attack the hijackers.

What they did was morally supererogatory.

In the Army, Soldiers are trained to–if necessary–fall on grenades in order to save the others in their units. (Those who do so realize they are dead anyway, and it’s merely a matter of saving their comrades.) It is not uncommon for soldiers who do that to receive posthumous Medals of Honor, as–training or no training–it is still a gutsy act.

But the passengers of Flight 93 were not military-trained combatants, yet they had already witnessed things that would challenge the resolve of our best Special Forces operators.

They had a decision to make, and they made the best decision in a lose-lose situation.

On a day in which very little went right, the Constitutional Militia of Flight 93 reported for duty, and scored our first victory against Islamist terrorists.

The passengers also scored another major accomplishment: they made future hijackings less likely. Now, anyone who attempts to hijack an American flight will get beat to a pulp. They’ll never make it into the cockpit. If the sky marshals don’t put bullets in their heads, the passengers will take care of business.

Ergo, the heroes of Flight 93 made our skies safer.

United 93 also presents another group of heroes: the air traffic controllers (ATCs).

On a good day, ATCs have one of the hardest jobs in America. Their job is to keep planes from meeting in the air (or on the ground). That involves properly directing aircraft taxiing, taking off, ascending, flying level, approaching the runway, landing, and taxiing. When they get it wrong, lots of people die. And all it takes for that to happen is the slightest lapse in concentration.

From the moment American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North WTC Tower to just past noon, the ATCs safely brought in over 4,000 aircraft without so much as a near-miss.

United 93 is a fitting tribute to the passengers who scored a major victory, and the ATCs who kept their heads and did a remarkable job under the most extraordinary pressure.

Semper Fi to the heroes Flight 93, and hats off to Hollywood.

I often chide them when they get it wrong, but they got it right this time.

11/12/2005: If Jarhead is not the worst war movie I’ve seen, it is one of the worst. It may be the first movie attempted regarding Gulf War I, and it is a complete disgrace. It does no justice to our troops, and sheds no light on what our troops accomplished. It is a cynical screed that exemplifies typical Hollywood disdain for our military, our commanders, and our troops.

The movie is not even realistic. The very first scene gives that away. Drill Sergeants stopped physically assaulting recruits a long time ago. The presentation of Scout Sniper training is poorly-done. In the real world, sniper candidates experience an extremely grueling regimen from which about one third graduate. Aside from Recon Marines, Scout Snipers are the best of the Corps.

Even from a cinematic standpoint, it sucks. It is boring. There is no serious plot. All the characters are hypersexed and cynical. Everything is one cliche after another.

Originality? Please!

The major part of the movie was the months-long buildup during which time the soldiers all talked about their girlfriends, cursed each other out, argued with the Sergeants, and maintained a low morale. (The narrator was fixated on masturbation.)

Two Marines received “gifts” from their girlfriends. Swofford–the main character–was dumped. Another received what he thought was a video of Deer Hunter, which was–in fact–a video of his wife having sex with a neighbor. I guess that’s called Hallmark with an attitude. How touching!

While every military deployment has very real setbacks (that’s why we call it “the service”), Jarhead captures only the negative and ignores the positive. As a whole, the movie hardly squares with the accounts of Marines I know who served in Gulf War I.

Jarhead is nothing but a hopelessly profane, cynical, pointless social diatribe that does our Marines a complete disservice.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I give it a zero.

08/14/2005: Very few war movies–based on actual events–provide justice to the troops who fought in them or the events they seek to portray. Most Vietnam movies, for example, are a complete disgrace to the troops who fought honorably, many of whom paid the ultimate sacrifice. (Thankfully, We Were Soldiers righted many of those wrongs.)

The Great Raid is another such film, as it pays a long-overdue tribute to two fine groups of American soldiers: survivors of the Bataan Death March, and the soldiers of the 6th Ranger Batallion who pulled off the greatest rescue in military history: the liberation of the Cabanatuan POW camp in the Philippines.

The Bataan Death March, in and of itself, is one of the most grievous acts of torture in modern history. Forced to march over 60 miles with little food or water, thousands of Allied troops and Filipinos died from the brutality of Japanese soldiers, who often used detainees for bayonet practice. Those who survived the Bataan Death March lived in horrific and savage conditions. Overall, one in three prisoners would die. As the Allies retook the Philippines, the Japanese started executing POWs: they burned 150 Americans to death at the Palawan POW camp.

It is against this backdrop that the Cabanatuan rescue takes place.

The Great Raid is based upon two books: Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides, and The Great Raid on Cabanatuan, by William Breuer. Benjamin Bratt plays Col. Henry Mucci, the commanding officer of the 6th Ranger Batallion. James Franco plays Capt. Robert Prince, the assault commander of the Cabanatuan raid. Bratt does an outstanding job portraying Mucci, a hard-core fitness nut whose compatriots had once described as “Little MacArthur”, pipe and all. Franco also does justice to Capt. Prince, the steely, calm commander whose determination and resilience helped pull off a most improbable rescue mission by a well-trained but inexperienced group of warriors.

John Dahl, the director, did a commendable job by providing the viewer with a sense of the enormous difficulty and complexity of the rescue: from the long march to the camp, to the difficulty of getting into the camp with adequate cover, to being vastly outnumbered, to keeping Japanese tanks at bay, to providing adequate means to get the POWs–most of whom were malnourished and unable to walk–to safety. The enemy was brutal, and the probability of success was very low.

In the end, the Rangers freed over 500 prisoners, with two Rangers killed and two POWs killed. The Filipinos–who also fought valiantly–lost 21 soldiers.

For the most part, the movie sticks to the facts: what you get is a very accurate portrayal of a most harrowing military success. I also credit Dahl for doing justice to the hard work and sacrifice of our troops without gratuitous blood and gore. The violence is well-contextualized, and not overdone. Dahl strikes the perfect balance between Saving Private Ryan and a Disney production.

The only thing I would have changed was this: in reality, Col. Mucci forbade any soldier from participating in the raid if he hadn’t spent some serious time in prayer about it beforehand. This was not shown in the movie, but would have been proper for inclusion. This mission was most urgent, for a cause nothing short of just and righteous. Those words may not be politically-correct today, but are nonetheless very appropriate.

Our POWs–who had suffered nearly unimaginable abuses–were depending on the good faith of America. The 6th Ranger Batallion delivered like no other before or since.

World War II was not a war for my generation, but the accomplishments of that great generation–defeating two brutal, formidible and determined enemies–transcend all generations. The Great Raid captures all of that in one movie. Well-done.