The Beginning of This Blog is A Half-Truth

So I've created a second blog with this "Film Reviews and Other Things" as would be increasingly obvious given that this isn't my first blog "Mountains, Highways, and the Little Things." I made this second blog to put any reviews of films I've seen (as many people will tell you, I have a tendency to be a film snob) along with any other things I feel like reviewing (Music, TV Shows, etc.). At the same time, I'll even use this blog to put any random things I want to write here, rather than in my primary blog. Possibly even the occasional video or two. I want to focus Mountains on my life and day to day happenings, and this blog on the extraneous.

So for this first post, I want to dive in to reviewing the TV Show, Breaking Bad which just recently finished up its fourth season.

How I Found It   

About two summers ago I was having a terrible experience with insomnia. I'd stay up late, wander the house, and try everything possible to get myself some much-needed sleep. When all else failed, I'd pop on the TV and peruse the late-night watching. By chance, I stumbled upon an AMC marathon of Breaking Bad. I think at the time they were recapping the entirety of Season 2 before premiering the third season. Anyways, that isn't what's important here. What's important is that out of curiosity I put it on and managed to catch the episode titled "4 Days Out" and was blown away.

The episode itself acts mostly as a platform to develop the relationship between the two main characters, while also give a rising tension with Walt's ongoing condition (which I'll get to when I talk about the story) but the way in which the characters interact and the strong writing of the episode sucked me in without knowing the first thing about any of them.  

Wait. No. I'll do this later. 

Let me tell you all a story about a film called Act of Valor.

Do you remember Quentin Tarantino's film Inglorious Basterds? Then you'll remember the film starring the character Frederick Zoller called Nation's Pride. Zoller, as the eponymous Nation's Pride is shown in redundant scenes killing as many Allied soldiers as they can fit on the screen at a time. In fitting with propaganda put out by Goebbels at the time, the reason was purely to inspire the people in Nazi occupied countries to bear witness to the "sheer strength" of the Nazi regime. You'll remember it wasn't about anything aside from the violence and how Zoller was such a "hero" for the Reich just measured by the number of Allied soldiers he could gun down.

You'll also remember Shoshanna Dreyfus burning the film and the theater to the ground. 

This is how I felt when I was watching Act of Valor.

While watching this movie I was terrified that I might turn to the screen and see a distraught Jewish-French woman avenging her family and then promptly lighting me on fire.

Why

Okay, so the movie starts off tame enough, training exercises, squad bonding at the beach. It's all pretty typical for the beginning of a modern war movie, especially recently. The opening of Battle: Los Angeles comes to mind immediately, and the mediocrity that followed.

Not even Aaron Echkart could save this crap.

This was a great idea!

Actually, scratch that, I'm going to start with the positive aspects of the film; be a little more balanced in my presentation. The cinematography was great, some of the best I've seen in a film of this type. The director realizes how to capture tension in the silent moments of the film, and it pays off splendidly. The action is well choreographed, but I feel like this isn't by way of the director, but rather by way of filming these scenes in ways reminiscent of training exercises. At least, that's how it seems. And for the most part the film does this very, very well. The action is tense and tight, and the camera is creatively implemented. Some of my favorite shots in the film come from the action sequences in a first person perspective. It's interestingly done, you hear the breath of the character, and you see each slight movement. It adds to the scene in a way that other war films in the past have missed. If a shot or two like this had made it into, say, Black Hawk Down, the intensity of an already tense movie would have been increased dramatically. Not to mention, it's done much better than when it was (I'm saying this tentatively) first implemented for about 60 seconds in Doom.

Who exactly was this guy?

Sadly, this is where the movie runs thin. Casting active duty SEALs in theory is a good idea. A chance to see the people who serve the country in their element. However, these men do not act. They should not act. The only times I felt like they could act was during the action sequences. The men shine here, everything is authentic and detailed to a point. When they try to bring character to the soldiers though, the movie fails at just about every conceivable level. The only characterization that happens in the entire movie is the beginning when the narrator gives names and some semblance of a back story to everyone in the squad. It ends here. Trust me, you will forget everyone's name and everyone's back story immediately after this scene. The supposed "main character," who I'm just going to call "EL-TEE" because that's about the only name he gets called, gets a little more characterization.

In their defense, babies are cute

His wife is having a baby. That's it. They're really damn persistent that he's having a baby too. They reference it in almost every scene from the beginning until the baby is actually born at the end. Just because you repeat it does not make the characterization any more cut and dry.

Early on in the film, Mikey (if that's even his name) takes a hit, and you can't even tell that it's that specific character that went down. I could see the director trying to make some point out of it, something along the lines of "every day soldiers are killed faceless and nameless, and we attempted to replicate that in our scenes." I feel that this point could have been done, if they hadn't gone ahead and made a huge deal that it was Mikey that was hit. I swear the next scenes of the movie the dialogue is nothing but "get to the extract now" and some version of "Mikey took a bullet to the face" and other garbled grunting. Then here's the thing; you never see or hear anything from Mikey until the end of the movie. I always believed war films drew their strengths by the depth of their character. You want to identify with the characters, feel for their struggle with their fellow man. So why would they make these characters so under developed and so faceless? There's no emotion here. "EL-TEE" dies at the end, and I felt nothing. Why? They tell you he's going to die pretty much in the first 30 seconds of the film. They give us no reason to care why he died. They hardly even show the wife's reaction to humanize it even the smallest bit. 

By the end of the movie, I feel like using the reasoning that "nameless and faceless soldiers die every day" argument is just damage control for something that was just sloppily written. The same message was sent home in Black Hawk Down, but here's the thing. We cared about the ones that we couldn't remember their names. We cared that they fell in battle. Why? Because of the interaction between characters, the way they talk to each other. The fact that they have a human face that we can identify with. Ridley Scott spent more than 3 minutes developing his characters. The entire first act is purely getting to know the men that we'll see for the next two and a half hours. That's not to mention the scenes in between the action where we see how they're reacting to the fight. I cared when they were trying to perform surgery in the field because of the emotion put into it, how they were thrust into a situation they didn't want to be in; the desperation of being cut off in combat. When Mikey gets hit, I don't care. They treat it as "business as usual." When Mikey comes to, he doesn't even react to the fact that he just took a whole freaking bullet to his face and lived. He screams once, and then just casually asks how the operation is going.

Seriously?

This is what emotion should look like

I'm going to stop referencing Black Hawk Down and move to Saving Private Ryan. Remember when Giovanni Ribisi's character gets hit and he cries for his mother when just scenes earlier he had been talking about his strained relationship with her? That's how a war film should handle a situation like this, not just glazing over it and acting like it never happened. Look, I get it. Soldiers have to move on or they'll never survive, but here's the thing, the audience aren't soldiers. We go to theaters to feel, to purge our pathos like Socrates theorized, not to feel like a part of a mechanical procedure.  I feel like the soldiers just jump from flashpoint to flashpoint without any hint of the toll this is taking on them. We're given very little reason as to why they even go to the places they do. That is why Act of Valor fails.

I haven't even mentioned the villains yet. The main bad guy, whose name unsurprisingly escapes me, is a conglomerate of just about every nationalistic terrorist from Osama Bin Laden to the entirety of the Hamas. They give him no motivation beyond "America is evil. America oppresses the Middle East." All this character does is reinforce negative stereotypes we have about Middle Eastern culture, and if his mustache didn't grow into his beard he would be twirling it for the entire movie. That's not to mention his appearance almost screams "Bond Villain." Big, bushy beard, long gnarly scar by his eyes. I was surprised he wasn't stroking a white cat and sitting in an armchair in some scenes. I don't see why he couldn't have had some sort of motivation. It wouldn't have been hard to do. Instead, they just have him going around spouting lines about "getting into Heaven" through suicide bombing. He sounds like a broken record at times. All the writers was reinforce negative stereotypes about their culture. If they had taken the time to flesh him out a little bit, then you'd have an interesting look at what the face of terrorism is really like. Hear me out, all they had to do was give him a reasonable motivation, give him a believable why, and then explore just what his cause really means to him and for the people who end up following him. That would be complex, that would be something new and exciting. For a movie attempting a lot of new ideas, it's disappointing to see them settle for a one-note villain instead of trying something unique. 

So from now on, this is not a war film. This is just a stereotypical action film. This is Call of Duty: Act of Valor. Let's think for a minute here. What is the video game Call of Duty? You're a faceless soldier whisked from flashpoint to flashpoint, and for what reason exactly? Because they tell you to. There's no real reason. There's no real characters with any depth either. Just action, bad writing, and the list goes on. At least the makers of Call of Duty attempt to make some sort of commentary on violence, though they way it's done makes it seem like "Well, gee, how much shock value and controversy can we get?" I'm gonna go ahead and draw one more parallel to Call of Duty. The deaths of one of the characters at the end is oddly reminiscent of the end of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare:

If you haven't played the game; here's what happens. You're chased by the main bad guys after dismantling their operation, and end up crashed on the bridge. Your comrades die around you, and all your left with is a pistol to kill the bad guy as he approaches you to finish you off.

In Act of Valor one of the main characters is shot a surprising amount of times, and survives, and slumps near lifeless against a wall. He pulls out his pistol and tries to take some final potshots at the main bad guy before he blacks out. Allies arrive in a deus ex machina fashion and save him, just like in Call of Duty. The way the camera moves in the first person perspective even mimics the same movements taken in the game. The similarities are striking. I feel like the writers didn't even try. If you're going to draw from commentary taken from other sources, why would you choose the Call of Duty franchise? Then if you're even drawing that commentary, why don't you even use it and instead opt for using a death scene?

How

Okay, so I'm going to swing back around to the reference to Nation's Pride that I made originally. Like the fictional Nation's Pride, Act of Valor is a propaganda film through and through.

 Think about it. Why did the Nazis make the film in the first place? The Allies were beginning the invasion of France, they needed a backing to their cause, to give their people a stronger resolve. Now look at our country. No. I am not likening the United States to Nazi Germany. If I get a single comment or complaint about that you will be promptly ignored. Anywho, we're entangled in conflicts overseas with terrorist organizations and the outlook, no matter what your political beliefs, is bleak. So what do we do? We show our branch of military that has proven successful being even more successful, and show them fighting all of our enemies and doing it well. 

Seriously, hear me out here. The Navy SEALs. They've done a lot recently, from saving that freighter ship captain to massive undertakings like taking down Osama Bin Laden. Showing those men doing these actions give people a certain sense of pride. Let's face it, people like hearing the good parts about war. When all we hear are negatives, it lowers morale. Even human-interest stories like the posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor given to the soldier who sacrificed himself by jumping on a grenade gives the nation a certain sense of hope in humanity. Coincidentally (note the sarcasm) that action is depicted, very predictably, in the final minutes of the film. In fact, all of the actions I described are mirrored here. 

When they save the CIA operative in the film, it's similar to the saving of the ship captain; right down to the sniper shots to clear the way for an infiltration team. Heck, later on they board a ship to get information from some Russian ne'er do well. Next, the raid on the milk factory to get the main bad guy seems oddly similar to the raid to get Osama. Well, minus the helicopter assault and the supposedly prototype helicopter that crashed. Still, it isn't much of a stretch to see the parallels the writers were drawing here. In fact, it's so obvious I felt like they were beating the references over our heads repeatedly.

That's not to mention the violence depicted in both. Within both of the films you see a gratuitous use of violence, with the main "heroes" cutting down swaths of their enemies. In Nation's Pride, you have Zoller mowing down American after American that move into the town, and in Act of Valor you have the SEALs kill an ungodly amount of Hispanics and Chechens. I seem to remember a brief scene in Nation's Pride where Zoller kills at least 5 soldiers in a machine gun barrage. The SEALs do the exact same thing when assaulting a small terrorist outpost in the middle of the desert. The action scenes in both are completely redundant too. With Nation's Pride you have the same shots of soldiers dying on sidewalks, and with Act of Valor just about each conflict ends up the same. That is, stealthily creeping in and then all hell breaking loose before they can get away. After a while, it all feels redundant. The violence has no meaning other than to show that "our respective soldiers kick ass" and that "we should support them in this kicking of ass." That's not showing support per se, so much as reinforcing the idea that we kill better than they kill. We are better. That's old school, classic American exceptionalism.

I want to take this a step further, and a bit deeper. Let's consider the settings of both films. In Nation's Pride they're fighting in a distinctly European town, the people who would see the movie would relate that to their own home. In Act of Valor most of the action takes place in Mexico, more specifically Mexicali. Where is Mexicali?

It's right there.

And which country is it closest to? You guessed it. The good ole' Red, White, and Blue. Practically our front door step. Honestly, I doubt that setting most of the movie in Mexico is a coincidence. Let's face it, a lot of social issues with the common American person stem from Mexico. Seriously. In the movie the only Mexican people we see are aiding the terrorist cause, going so far as to lead the terrorists across the border in Mexicali through a series of tunnels.

Am I the only one seeing the obvious here? Foreigners illegally coming into the country to do "harm" through Mexico? That's not to mention they make a completely pointless reference that they're moving through Cartel territory. Why bother? The Cartels have no bearing on the operation. They're just thrown in because the writers could. Drug Wars are a huge problem around the border, obviously. You hear about these wars all over the news, and it reasonably scares people. When you're making a movie about fighting terrorists overseas, setting it in Mexico and referencing the cartels sends a different message entirely.

If you ask me, it sounds like the writers are trying to get at the base fears of the common American citizen. What do we fear? Terrorists, Russians, Domestic Bombing, Illegal Immigrants, Drug Cartels, Drug Wars, Chechen nationalists, and even Economics. What does this movie revolve around? Every. Single. Fear. It even manages to squeeze in a reference to our economic situation, the terrorists plan to bomb these centers of commerce as to disrupt our economic activity. Really? They could have done literally anything but they choose to attack our economic system. Usually these types of movies focus on some sort of nuclear threat as that feels fictional, it feels like a far-off threat of a by-gone era. This type of plot seems geared for one reason, to prey on our insecurities with our economic system. Going beyond that, having the terrorists develop a weapon that's "virtually undetectable" is basic fear-mongering at its finest. What the writers are telling people here is that anyone can be a terrorist at anytime. It's always nice to see the paranoia of the American people being exploited for ill causes.

To me, this sounds like this, "All of the world is out to threaten America. Our own borders are not safe. Only our military in 'secret operations' can save us." I'm also going to add the odd anomaly that every single Mexican operative assisting the SEALs dies. Not even in a glorious fashion. They all just die. Why? There's no fanfare to their deaths, yet every American soldier has some overly glamorized Hollywood death. How much more blunt can you get? I was seriously surprised they didn't have the leader of the Mexican squad turn out to be corrupt and in cahoots with the terrorists. That honestly seemed to be the way the movie was heading, and given the way the writers portrayed the rest of Mexico I would not have been surprised.

To Conclude

I remember when the maitree'd of the theater was introducing the film and was met with applause and a multitude of "AW YEAH's" from the crowd. Especially when mentioning that the movie starred actual soldiers. The reaction was similar, if not exactly like the film-goers reaction in Inglorious Basterds. Yet that was fiction. This was reality.

Remember in Inglorious Basterds when the whole viewing of Nation's Pride was supposed to be a darkly satiric look at the Nazi culture? Then what the hell is Act of Valor supposed to be? If we were supposed to laugh at the sheer idea that something of that sort could have existed, what do we do when it actually exists?!

I'm at a loss. I was delusional in thinking that society had progressed beyond this mindless propaganda. When I see people saying how this "movie was so great" when they missed the blunt, obvious points the writers finagled into the picture, I am honestly disheartened. I remember when Matt Stone and Trey Parker satirized ideas like this with Team America: World Police. I guess it's a hard lesson to learn.

If Obama was in the audience, I would have been terrified that some displaced Chechen-Russian woman would appear on the screen and burn us all alive. Sad thing is, I wouldn't have been surprised either.

5/10

+ Cinematography 

+ Intensity

- Characters

- Story

- Everything else

 Source for images: Google images. No copyright infringement intended