Posted by
Daniel Crandall on Friday, May 16, 2008 11:17:56 AM
But only if it involves fighting creatures like this.
If it involves fighting these guys
then Hollywood actually seems to take the side of those in black.
Prince Caspian gives more weight to the argument that, once again, Hollywood is prepared to go to war against Orcs, goblins and other fantasy monsters, but just can't bring itself to recognize the real Islamo-Nazi monsters we face today.
Andrew Klavan
wrote, in City Journal,
"The overwhelming impression that reporters with our fighters in the
Middle East send back is of professionalism, valor, and continued faith
in the mission. These movies, as the Wall Street Journal’s
Peggy Noonan recently pointed out, simply select modern images that
remind them of the old Vietnam-era films and rehash them to support
their outmoded political points of view.
"Locked in an echo chamber of fashionable leftism, our filmmakers
have lost the ability to question those discredited assumptions. Only
in fantasy war films—films like Spielberg’s undervalued War of the Worlds, Michael Bay’s amusing Transformers, or Peter Jackson’s wonderful Lord of the Rings
trilogy—does the truth of our present situation emerge. Here,
filmmakers don’t have to confront the deathblow that radical Islam
deals to the logic of leftist ideology. They can portray evil without
giving it a human face and affirm our values without paying too
particular a tribute to the nation in which those values become flesh."
I look forward to seeing Prince Caspian this weekend. I also look forward to the release of a modern war epic positively portraying American forces who put themselves in harms way to keep you and me safe from the Orcs flowing out of radical Islam.