During the Vietnam war chances were that if you were a future movie director you’d either have been drafted OR you would know someone who was drafted. Even if you stayed home and your friends and family survived, you would still have been immersed in a radically changing culture.

Compare that to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and you have no draft, deaths drawn mainly from the lower social classes and a culture that was largely unchanged and unaffected by the war despite the executive’s claims of existential threat.

Essentially people are trying to make films about stuff they know nothing about. Even Generation Kill is based upon a book by an embeded reporter and it has all the flaws of the embeded reporter system : it’s way too close to the American soldiers and it has no grasp of wider context either culturally or militarily.

I haven’t seen Stop-Loss but I did see In The Valley of Elah and that dealt with what happened once the troops came home (but even then most of the interesting stuff was left on the cutting room floor).

I think a lot of blockbusters flirt with gloominess but little more. The Dark Knight’s ending reset the status quo (Batman is back to being a lone avenging angel outside the law), Watchmen was dreary but it tanked (as did Knowing) and Iron Man was quite upbeat and its geopolitical overtones were little more than guys with guns and beards.

Star Trek is a better example as it’s not only about building a better world, it’s about taking a world that is entirely familiar to audiences and turning back the clock on it, taking out all of the tedious complicated bits and stripping it back to action and special effects.

People always want to escape but they’repicky about which worlds they escape too and they prefer (offly enough) the nicer ones. The ones that make sense.

Certainly, the number of worthwhile Iraq films is slight. But if we consider the Vietnam films, if wasn’t until the US had pulled out of Vietnam that any films really emerged that warranted any serious attention (save for perhaps Go tell the Spartans, and possibly MASH which sublimated their subject matter by dealing with different wars). And even then these early films (Deer Hunter, Coming Home, Taxi Driver even) dealt with the toll of the war on America and the treatment of troops, resisiting locating themselves too heavily in the war itself (Deer Hunter, controversially, only featuring the war via THAT russian roulette scene).

It’s no suprise then that perhaps the closest I’ve seen to a decent Iraq war film is perhaps Stop-Loss, which once again deals with the troops treatment when back home.

I haven’t seen Generation Kill yet but I suspect that might get a bit closer to the matter – though it’s TV obviously.

> the Summer Blockbuster season is starting earlier and earlier and ending later and later

True, but what are those films? Apocalyptic gloomfests like Knowing? Thrillers that flirt with reality like the Bourne films. Even superheroes are getting pretty gloomy (Dark Knight and Watchmen, even Iron Man had a middle-eastern context and alluded to a geopolitical reality). I suspect audiences are yearning for a whole world to escape into now like they did with Star Wars, and more recently, just after 9/11, the Lord Of the Rings Trilogy. Maybe that’s what JJ Abrahams Star Trek is reaching for?

I’m not sure about the cyclical thing though. I think that Star Wars is over 30 years old and the Summer Blockbuster season is starting earlier and earlier and ending later and later. I can’t see that ending any time soon. Hollywood’s auteurist 70s moment was an aberration. We’re even seeing the return of producers overshadowing directors in the way they did back during the ‘golden age’ of Hollywood.

“Movies like Crossing Over and Babel aren’t cultural indictments (that requires focus) so much as softheaded shrugs. Let this be the last of a kind of cloying, paranoid cinema we should all be sick and tired of.”

Certainly, this trend towards misanthropy and cynicism found spirited voice in 70′s Hollywood, but the overall story was the public could only stick so many Pakula thrillers and Taxi Drivers etc and something positive had to give – that positive, full of certainities obviously arrived in Star Wars in a big way. It’s a reminder that while art might be a dumping ground for our collective anxieties, it’s also home to our aspirations and hopes too.

http://www.timeout.com/film/newyork/reviews/86760/crossing-over.html