War games

ABOUT a decade ago, a series of earnest and mostly dull Hollywood films weighed the cost of America's wars in the Middle East. Paul Haggis's 'In the Valley of Elah' came out in 2007 and 'Stop-Loss', directed by Kimberly Peirce, in 2008. These downbeat dramas were followed by a generation of action movies which fetishised the danger of being a soldier in Afghanistan and Iraq. Chief among them was Kathryn Bigelow's 'The Hurt Locker' (2008), Peter Berg's 'Lone Survivor' (2013) and 'American Sniper' directed by Clint Eastwood a year later. More recently, Hollywood's embrace of war in the Middle East has shifted again.Its latest dispatches from the front line, or just behind it, are raucous comedies. Their protagonists are American civilians who learn that there is adventure to be had and money to be made by flying to a war zone. In these films'which are mostly, loosely speaking, based on true stories'Baghdad and Kabul are lawless gold-rush towns where failures can reinvent themselves as hard-partying successes, and where the bullets whizzing past their ears are all part of the rowdy fun.First came...Continue reading
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