If you’re seeing an American film about the American military, the chances are good that it won’t be an antiwar polemic. American productions that feature soldiers and military equipment and/or explore the inner workings of the U.S. armed services typically have to cooperate with the Pentagon in order to get a movie made.
The Army, the Navy, the Marines, etc., often provide a film production with uniforms, vehicles, weapons, or even training for its actors, under the stipulation that the military be allowed to give its approval of the script. War films can, of course, be made without the approval of the U.S. military, but if they’re critical of the U.S. armed forces in any way, the government will openly sneer at them.
It’s easy to find hit films that vaunt the military. “Captain Marvel,” for instance, came hand-in-hand with Air Force recruitment videos, and even some films that claim to be about pacifism — see: “Hacksaw Ridge” — end up glorifying violence anyway.
Meanwhile, some films — like Terrence Malick’s “A Hidden Life” or Edward Berger’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” — are pointedly against the very notion of war and don’t make the soldiers’ experiences look too rosy.
When soldiers themselves go to see these movies, though, they are likely unconcerned with the political viewpoints of the filmmakers or the collaboration a studio might have made with the Pentagon. They’re probably going to enjoy films that look at soldiers as people and seek out movies that accurately capture both the negative and positive aspects of their gigs as government-sponsored weapons handlers.
Case in point: Clint Eastwood’s 1986 film “Heartbreak Ridge,” a riff on “Twelve O’Clock High,” wherein a retired Marine is called back into action to whip an unruly platoon into shape. The military hated “Heartbreak Ridge.” According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, soldiers loved it.
In “Heartbreak Ridge,” Eastwood plays Tom Highway (as in “my way or the Highway”), a former Marine who is seen as having aged out of the modern military. Despite this, he is called back into the service and given the sure-to-fail gig of training an utterly hopeless reconnaissance platoon, soon to be shipped off to Granada. The platoon fell into ill behavior because their previous commander was indifferent to their success. The soldiers (Mario Van Peebles among them) are indeed whipped into shape, and Highway leads a campaign to rescue captured Americans held captive by Cubans.