War

dir: Kathryn Bigelow

2025

Fuck this film, honestly.

Sure, it’s well made, the performances are all fine, the tension is over the top, but come on.

I don’t think anyone other than the dumbest of Americans thinks nuclear war is winnable, that there’s a scenario whereby one can win a war by using nuclear weapons (now). I think most people get that having them means countries without them can’t attack you or talk too much shit about you. With the countries that have them, well, you fight through proxies, but never directly, because you don’t want to nuke each other.

We all pretty much get that if one was launched at the States, or at China, or Russia, from anywhere, we’re pretty much all fucked. It’s all over. Done. This film goes to some trouble to explain why.

In the 80s at least, though it was policy probably decades before (since Eisenhower), the president at the time, who the rest of us naively thought would be the worst president those fuckheads would come up with after Nixon, explained to the American people that Reagan’s policy with respect to what would happen if the Soviets ever launched or detonated a missile over the US would mean there would be Mutually Assured Destruction. If the States couldn’t rule the world, there was no way they were going to let the Russkies have all the cake and eat it too. If we go, we all go, was the message.

(十一人の賊軍)

dir: Kazuya Shiraishi

2024

11 Rebels joins the illustrious ranks of Japanese period piece katana wielding action movies where a small number of wonderful people fight a much greater force and somehow come out on top but also all still mostly die by the end.

Why, yes, I am taking the piss, but am I exaggerating? Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is literally about seven guys who fight off 40 or so bandits, and win but mostly die. This flick set the template for so many action flicks for decades to come, not just in Japan, that we’re still suffering for it to this very day. Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins, itself a loose remake of Kurosawa’s masterpiece, doubled the number of fighters but multiplied the enemy into the hundreds.

And of course I can’t not mention 47 Ronin, which literally has a bunch of ronin get revenge on a lord who dishonoured them, and once they’ve won their epic battle (after four hours of screen time), they all commit harakiri, which is just insane, the most insane thing that’s ever happened in the history of insane things happening. And Japanese people love that fucking story!

This flick has 11 people forced to fight against their will, or against being immediately executed, with the promise of maybe not being executed later if they survive, which they’re not meant to, and it’s all a lie because the sneaky piece of shit who’s really pulling all of the strings needs everyone to be dead anyway.

Everyone thinks they’re the main character in this flick. All of them with the exclusion of one character, being Mizoguchi (Sadao Abe) are profoundly wrong. The young lord who thinks he runs this province is wrong. The smug generals who lead two competing armies are wrong. The de facto and completely unwilling leader of the 11 rebels doesn’t want to be the main character at all, and he gets his wish. The samurai bullying the rebels into defending a key bridge and a key fortress thinks he’s the main character, because he’s a samurai, but guess what, he’s not right either.

They’re all wrong except for Mizoguchi. This is the era in Japanese history where samurai had to shave the middle bit of their heads, so many of the samurai look, to use the culturally sensitive term, fucking ridiculous. Mizoguchi definitely has that, as well as beady, froglike eyes, and is middle-aged, so he doesn’t lop off a single head or limb. But there is no doubt at all that everything that happens for the next two plus hours is because he wills it to happen.

dir: Jalmari Helander

2022

Now, having watched a film where people skilfully murder legions of Nazis a couple of nights ago, I decided to stick with the theme and watch another film about someone murdering Nazis, except this one is more of a one-man-genocide type of thing, and he never asked for it anyway.

He didn’t start the fight, but he’s going to finish it.

In the last days of World War II, Nazis are fleeing Finland, but they’re also scorching the earth as they retreat, laying land mines and slaughtering innocents just for the fuck of it on their way out the door. A platoon of salty fuckers come across a man who was minding his own business, and try to end him for whatever he was carrying, which in this case happens to be a shitload of gold that he dug up himself.

Nazis, being Nazis, don’t know how to share, or just let people be. So Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) is forced to painfully slaughter these malign idiots one by one.

It’s funny to me that this flick, with a different emphasis and shift of perspective, and a bit of re-writing, could just as easily be a story where a scared, remorseful squad of Nazi deserters are terrorised and gruesomely dispatched by a ruthless, almost mythological monster, picking them off in the dark or through the fog until the last man is left standing, or clutching a bloodied stump.

This is, like all films about World War II currently, indebted openly to fucking Quentin Tarantino, and not only his take on Italian 70s exploitation trash like Inglourious Basterds, but also his reinterpretation / re-appropriation of Sergio Leonie’s spaghetti Western motifs, musical cues, even down to the goddamn fonts (and their colour) used for the onscreen text. It’s, like, I’m sick of Tarantino’s infection infecting everything (which was painfully obvious in Guy Ritchie’s recent The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare), but it’s not ill-used here.

What is the purpose of this movie… well, everyone else gets to make patriotic movies about what badasses they are, why not the Finns? In Aatami, as per the title of the movie, they have the literal embodiment of a national character trait they believe is not only specific to Finns, but that it’s untranslatable to non-Finnish speakers. It’s beyond stoicism, beyond resoluteness, beyond grit and determination. Beyond brutal.

It’s probably a crock of shit, and I roll my eyes whenever I hear anyone say something so patronising as “oh, well, this concept doesn’t translate properly into your petty bullshit language”.

dir: Alex Garland

2024

I remember when I first heard that such a flick as this was coming out, I thought “too soon”. I thought it would be about the abject and persistent stupidity of the Trump years resulting in some ill-considered what if? scenario whereby even worse things happened than what happened, like, millions of deaths and such due to covid-related madness.

And then when I found out “it’s not about America’s gun obsession or the orange emperor – it’s about war correspondent journalists” I thought it would be an odd concoction, indeed.

I wasn’t really worried about the current status of legacy journalism. I mean, we all should be, since the blank eyed salamanders of Silicon Valley and venture capital have gutted newsrooms and papers the world over, to be replaced with whatever trenchant thoughts complete idiots think need to be loaded into the push notifications on our phones. But honestly the last time I thought about war correspondent photographers was… never.

They can look after themselves. There have always been sets of clichés about them, like they’re a cut above regular boring journalists because they put themselves in such proximity to danger for the good of the rest of us. The main cliché in American stuff that I recall is the one about how they all wear vests with pockets and such, and that they’re undependable adrenalin junkies who don’t feel alive unless bullets are flying past their ears.

I don’t feel any particular way about them, though I am in general a fan of journalists and journalism. Photographers on the other hand…