| RATING: | 40% |
| FORMAT: | DVD |
spielberg rips himself off
A “white history month” mini-series that plays the game of pretending that Europe was liberated from Nazi oppression to free the Jews in the same way that Whites so often pretend that the US Civil War was fought to liberate Blacks. An ahistorical history lesson that forgets everything that has been learned from actually fighting wars and from recreating them in movies. The foolishness of these men's sacrifice is glorified in a way that only warmongers could find convincing. The fact that German soldiers and paratroopers were far more effective fighters and had better field commanders - albeit led by a raving megalomaniac - is completely elided.
The war in the European theater had little to do with America since Germany had not attacked them. So this is a desperate attempt to justify a war that was fought to save the British Empire and the wealth of rich White males, at the expense of the poor White ones - hardly an empire based on the principles of freedom and justice implied here. As with all attempts to whitewash White history by Whites, objective reality takes a backseat to the need to justify mass-destruction for the benefit of the few. (One day, perhaps, a movie will be made about the few brave souls who refused to participate as conscientious objectors in the mass slaughter.)
A bland rip off of a bland movie (Saving Private Ryan) that manages to be even more ethically inept. Whites here are trying to claim that war can be simple and straightforward when the real world simply is not like that. By talking only about the small picture this drama series loses any sense of why this particular war is being fought - as if soldiering were somehow independent of politics.
Wars of White domination in Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq have failed to recreate the allegedly simpler truths of Auld Lang Syne since the send-a-gunboat diplomacy no longer works and the terrorists will get what they want - White terror. This kind of stuff harks back to the US films that Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris used to make; showing American heroes re-fighting and winning the Vietnam War, for example. The essential goal here is not so much to say that war is hell or futile but that the good guys wear white Stetsons; bad guys, black.
This nursery-school politics is compensated-for with dazzling SFX that are a classic example of the tail wagging the dog; wherein the form is more important than the content. The enemy is never shown as human and it is only by assessing what you do not see that it is possible to guess the real motives for making such mediocre Work. This is a sad return to the kind of boys’ own xenophobia that says it is only through male bonding in combat that men can be men and that this glorifies the slaughter of those who gain no benefit from the fighting. This makes the present war (2011) more palatable by making war all about personal courage rather than personal profit. (The film The Brotherhood is far superior in this regard.) War movies like this are the same as pornographic movies for teenagers where the consequences and reasons for actions are not dramatized - only the actions - and are thus just as immature.
There is no criticism of bad decisions made by military leaders. No criticism of the suicidal decision to send infantrymen into wooded areas - increasing the lethal effectiveness of German artillery - when such forestation could easily have been detoured around. There is also no admission that The Battle of the Bulge was an American military failure that the British had to save them from.
Dramatic but vacuously acontextual with the added nonsense of the implication that the US won World War 2 - somehow without allies. So obsessed with the technicalities of storytelling that it forgets about the necessity of actually having a story to tell. A propagandist attempt to justify White imperialist adventures of today by glorifying the sacrifice of the poor - and propaganda makes feeble drama. Unlike wars of thousands of years ago, soldiers are unable to collect sizeable booty to provide them with decent incentives to risk their lives. The real sadness here is that all these survivors have is their memories of emotionally-intense youthful experiences. And there is nothing more pointless than empty nationalism and pointless patriotism. The sentimentality only makes this aspect of the drama worse. Simplistic to an intellectually-insulting degree.
People who do bad things together share the same bonds as those who do good, and it can be as hard to distinguish between them as it is in this series. Whites here are presenting themselves as world saviors - but who will save us from Whites?
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