The Cheshire Cat isn’t the only one grinning in Wonderland these days. Alice in Wonderland, Tim Burton’s curiously entertaining 3-D romp, was the weekend’s box-office champion again, collecting another $62 million to bring its two-week total to slightly mad $208.6 mil. Three newcomers—Green Zone, She’s Out of My League and Remember Me—made $32.4 million collectively, yet finished second, third and fourth.
Green Zone‘s weekend results must’ve been especially disappointing to its makers. The R-rated Iraqi War flick reunited A-lister Matt Damon with The Bourne Supremacy/Ultimatum director Paul Greengrass, and surely the folks at Universal were hoping for more. But maybe they shouldn’t have. From what I gather, Green Zone was a well-crafted, but rather politically biased, effort—the latest in a long line of films to question our role in (and our motives for going into) Iraq. Almost all of them have flopped: Even The Hurt Locker, which took a pretty dispassionate look at the Iraqi War and scored several Oscars recently, barely made $15.7 million.
All of which suggests, to me, two important points. One: The film industry, by and large, thinks the United States’ involvement in Iraq was a mistake. Two: The rest of America doesn’t want to hear it.
But even though films like Green Zone have bombed at the box office, I can’t help but wonder if they’ll still affect how we view the war in Iraq down the road.
We all have thoughts about whether the war was justified or no, whether our government went in with the best of intentions or duplicitous motives. Perhaps history will give us a definitive answer—or perhaps we’ll never know for sure. But most of the films about the Iraqi War seem to tell us that we do know … and since not many people follow history very well, I can’t help but wonder whether Hollywood will forever shape how we view this critical period in our history, for better or worse.
It got me thinking a bit about war movies in general—how history influences them, and how they, in turn, influence us. Most of us believe World War II was perhaps history’s last truly “just” war, and history seems to back that up … but I can’t help but wonder whether all those flag-waving WW II flicks helped cement that view. The Vietnam War is seen as a national tragedy—a point of view bolstered by Platoon and Full Metal Jacket. And how many of us know much about the Korean War beyond what we’ve seen in M*A*S*H?
I dunno. I’m still mulling these thoughts around a bit, wondering whether it’s a theme worth exploring in a story down the road. And, as such, I’d be interested to hear what you think: How much do war movies influence how we see the wars they depict?
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