How to survive a war movie... - Printable Version +- Forums (https://www.theblitz.club/message_boards) +-- Forum: The Firing Line (https://www.theblitz.club/message_boards/forumdisplay.php?fid=1) +--- Forum: Combat Mission (https://www.theblitz.club/message_boards/forumdisplay.php?fid=10) +--- Thread: How to survive a war movie... (/showthread.php?tid=35681)

How to survive a war movie... - Rico (FGM) - 06-26-2006 riend sent this over -- a little dated, but still relevant... How to survive a war movie Don't be a lieutenant. Don't carry a picture of your girlfriend. And don't, whatever you do, read a book. By Justine Elias Justine Elias Guardian Friday February 22, 2002 Listen up, soldiers! With two stories of modern war, Black Hawk Down and Behind Enemy Lines, already playing in British cinemas, and with the second world war drama Hart's War and the Vietnam epic We Were Soldiers out next month, it's time you got a lesson in combat movie survival. I want you grunts to get through the current crop of war movies and come out the other side covered in blood, guts, and cinematic cliche. 1. Change your name to Butch Wolf In the combat movie, the guys who survive are grunts named Stone, Steele, and Black. If your name isn't synonymous with hardness, it ought to sound like something stiff, durable or fierce: Maverick, Wolf, Arrowsmith, Hawkins. Get the idea? If you've got a first name, it had better be Jack, Steve, Mike, Matt, Scott, or Butch. Otherwise you're dead. Whimsical nicknames (Wrong-Way, Puffy) are permissible only in fighter pilots, and only then if someone else in the squadron has a nickname (Goofy, Daffy, Pluto) sillier than yours, indicating his imminent demise. 2. Get busted down to private If you want a chance at survival, be an enlisted man. Don't be a lieutenant. Lieutenants are dainty college boys like Tommy Hart (Colin Farrell in Hart's War), a doe-eyed, smooth-faced Yale law student. Lieutenants are pussies forever being shown up by exasperated, seen-it-all sergeants. If you must be an officer, be a foul-mouthed, combat-hardened lieutenant colonel like Hal Moore (the real colonel played by Mel Gibson in We Were Soldiers), Apocalypse Now's Kilgore (Robert Duvall) or Black Hawk Down's Danny McKnight (another real person, played in the film by Tom Sizemore). Note the percussive consonants in Lt Col Danny McKnight; if you can't hear the brass balls clanging together, you're deaf. 3. Ditch your girlfriend Do not, under any circumstances, carry a photograph of your wife or girlfriend. Enemy snipers can home in on such photos from several miles away. Merely breathing the name of a female acquaintance could mark you for sudden death. If your girlfriend, Lucy Jean, is pregnant, but you promise you're sure gonna marry her when you get back to Iowa or Ohio, forget it. You're going home in a box. If a lovesick grunt shows off a wallet photo to the entire platoon, back away slowly. Let the other men whistle or make rude remarks. (If you're in a second world war movie, a slovenly corporal will, at the mere mention of a woman, exclaim, "Come to Papa!" Stay far away from him, too. He'll be stepping on a mine in the next reel, never having had a taste of "French mam-zelles".) Boost your chances for survival (as Charlie Sheen does in Platoon) by pretending to admire Lucy Jean's bovine features. Tell the whole catcalling, offensively gesturing platoon that Lucy Jean is "real pretty", and that "You guys should just lay off the new guy because he's doing the right thing". Enemy snipers will sympathise with your awkward social predicament and turn their sights back to the proper target: Lucy Jean's simpering boyfriend. 4. Don't be the New Guy If you are the newest recruit, and you are not narrating the film, you will die. You will be referred to only as the New Guy. As Sheen said in Platoon, "Nobody cares about the New Guy." There's a second world war movie that says it better: They Were Expendable. If you are the radio man, you are going to die. Your dramatic function is to get shot in the heat of battle so that the hero can grab the radio before saving everyone's asses. The Radio Man, too, dies unmourned. If you're in a period film, and your entire job in the military is carrying the company colours, you will die. The hero will seize the flag, rally the disheartened troops, and lead them to victory. You want a safe, behind-the-scenes job? Volunteer to be the soldier who paints "Welcome to Hell" (in English, of course) in a war-torn foreign city. It wouldn't be a contemporary war movie without that helpful, obvious war-is-hell graffiti. Perhaps this sarcastic grunt is the son or grandson of the guy who was assigned to stencil those little signs that read, "Dunkirk, 75 miles, Honululu, 2,500 miles". He's a survivor. 5. Make friends with the CO He is tough but fair, quirky yet by the book. He will have an extremely gravelly voice. He will be played by Bruce Willis (Hart's War), Mel Gibson (We Were Soldiers), Gene Hackman (Behind Enemy Lines), Sam Shepard (Black Hawk Down), Nick Nolte (The Thin Red Line), Harvey Keitel (U-571), Alec Baldwin (Pearl Harbor), Robert De Niro (Men of Honor), or Tommy Lee Jones (Rules of Engagement). He will be 20 years older than a real military man of his rank. He will love you, but not in a homosexual way. More in a you're-the-boy-he-once-was kind of way. 6. Throw away that book Don't do anything too artistic or refined in your free time. Sketching, cooking, taking pretty snapshots for the folks back home - do I need to explain what will happen once word of this gets out? In Black Hawk Down, we meet a Delta Force guy who's a budding author/illustrator of children's books. It's not a good sign that his magnum opus is dedicated to his small daughter and that the one finished sketch we see looks as though he's creating A Little Girl's Guide to the Spanish Inquisition. Merely reading a book while others nervously assemble their kit is enough to send you to the casualty ward. Ioan Gruffudd, in Black Hawk Down, suffers an epileptic seizure immediately after handling the US Army guidebook to Somali culture. If you must read, do so in a second world war movie. Choose challenging material in a foreign language, and wear little, round spectacles for protection. That way you're likely to be kept alive until quite late in the film, if only to provide helpful exposition for the hero. Then someone will taunt you, saying: "Hey, Professor, whatchya readin'? Hegel? Who's he - a Kraut?" "Whoa, look! This whole book's written in Kraut-talk! The professor here speaks German! That's sure gonna come in handy if we meet up with a German patrol!" 7. Don't send soppy letters home You've got to tell the folks back home that you're still alive, but don't be too effusive. If all you can say is "I love you" and "I miss you", you'll be marked as a sentimental character with no intrinsic value to the plot, and be killed off. Better to play to the audience, providing necessary descriptive and background detail. In A Walk in the Sun (1945), John Ireland's Private Craven incessantly composes unwritten letters to his sister, and later to the mother of a dead soldier. These give the audience an indication of what he's seeing. So it would be crazy to kill him off as we would lose track of where his platoon is in the bleak, black and white landscape. Writing to a female relation seems to be an essential rite of passage in your combat movie character's development. Platoon is framed by Sheen's voiceover narration, which indicates that he is telling the entire story, atrocities and all, in a letter to his grandmother. That's one hip grandmother. Or a very shocked one. 8. Examine your relationship with your father No, he isn't here with you, but sons fight the wars their fathers' generation started. So how do you feel about your father? And how do you feel about your father's military service record? Think carefully before answering. If you have normal issues with an absent or emotionally distant father, you'll be okay. Lt Tommy Hart sounds a bit in awe of his statesman/war hero father - but there's wistfulness in his voice, not anger, when he reveals that his father got him a soft assignment, far from the front, as a general's aide. If your father was accused of cowardice, though, and you only want to see his name cleared, you are golden in terms of movie survival, my little Top Gun. You shall live. You must live! The modern combat movie is all about you. 9. Carry a Bible. But don't read it Atheists, foxholes, no room, etc. Christians take up most of the spiritual space in this genre. Jews as combatants exist mainly as put-upon loners in second world war epics, like Montgomery Clift in The Young Lions; Hindus and Muslims, though more numerous in the real world, will have to consult combat films made in languages other than English. However, a little bit of Christianity goes a long way. Excessive scripture-quoting will set you up either for mockery (Black Hawk Down) or for a risky job as an Allied sniper (Barry Pepper's in Saving Private Ryan). And you don't want to end up as an unhinged evangelist who marches toward gruesome self-sacrifice while reciting the 23rd Psalm. Safety tip: a small Bible in the chest pocket will protect the wearer from all ordnance up to a rocket-propelled grenade. 10. Become an idealist There are no politics in wartime, there's just us and them. If you are the one guy in the movie who bothers to admire the landscape as you fly over it (as Josh Hartnett does in Black Hawk Down, and Charlie Sheen did in Platoon), flatten it in your tank, or cruise through it in a Humvee, you should marvel (bonus points if you do this in voiceover) that "there really seemed to be no difference between us and them". A character who is willing to change - to learn - is one who usually survives. So if you, like Black Hawk Down's (real) helicopter pilot and Behind Enemy Lines' (fictional) fighter pilot, get cracked on the head with a rifle butt, yet you still believe that you can make the enemy militiaman, who is screaming at you in his native tongue, understand that you and your heavily armed comrades are in his country to do good, then you are the bravest and rarest of human beings, but the commonest of movie heroes: the true idealist. If you're the guy whose superior officers berate you because you "just don't get it", then that means that you (like the audience) truly do understand. You're getting out of this movie alive. RE: How to survive a war movie... - Vulture - 06-26-2006 Awesome :) Vulture (FGM)