![]() Of the two most notable exceptions, the first was Oliver Stone’s 2008 biopic W, which folded the Iraq war into the larger story of George W Bush’s life, as he made his improbable rise from a wayward, hard-drinking, mediocre failson to a two-term president eager to settle his father’s scores. Much like The Hurt Locker, many of the films that did get made about Iraq kept the focus on individual heroics and traumas, rather than the murkier, decidedly unheroic issues of how we got into this mess in the first place. Photograph: Keith Bernstein/Warner Bros/Allstar ![]() Keep in mind: The Hurt Locker was independently produced and distributed by Summit Entertainment, which made a little money with the Twilight movies before getting gobbled up by Lionsgate.īradley Cooper in American Sniper. Yet there’s reason to be pessimistic about the risk-averse, IP-addicted studios of the 21st century dipping back into a war that it rarely bothered to engage with in the first place. Most of the major Hollywood films about Vietnam – The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Casualties of War – were produced well after the war, when the urgency of an ongoing conflict could ease into perspective about its costs. ![]() The cinematic history of the Iraq war has not been entirely written, even 20 years after it started. It didn’t matter that Bigelow and Boal were not making an explicitly anti-war film, focused on visceral, exciting, on-the-ground experiences. That’s the Iraq war of The Hurt Locker – a rudderless, perilous, borderline nihilistic endeavor that politicians could not risk their careers to end. The minor combat operations would continue indefinitely, of course, as the power vacuum was filled by the chaos of a growing insurgency and great spasms of sectarian violence. The dramatic events of the invasion were over within a few months: Saddam Hussein’s regime had been toppled, along with his statue in Baghdad’s Firdos Square, and George W Bush had flown on to an aircraft carrier with a “Mission Accomplished” banner, declaring that major combat operations were over. And yet, five years into the war, Americans simply did not want to hear about it.
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