July 12, 1996
I know why I didn’t watch COURAGE UNDER FIRE in ’96. I was very anti-war, in a country that had generally accepted the Gulf War as a good thing, and I didn’t want to sit through more bullshit about how proud we should all be about it. And also, let’s be honest, I wasn’t exactly looking for Serious Adult Drama unless it was from filmmakers I was already into. I was not into director Ed Zwick (GLORY, LEAVING NORMAL) or writer Patrick Sheane Duncan (84C MOPIC, MR. HOLLAND’S OPUS), so it didn’t really matter that it was shot by Roger Deakins (between FARGO and KUNDUN), edited by Steven Rosenblum (STEELE JUSTICE, BRAVEHEART), with music by James Horner (BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS, UNCOMMON VALOR, COMMANDO).
Watching it now, sitting through the opening news montage about the war, it doesn’t feel like we’re supposed to question any of it. Then we go into a tank battle that’s very visually connected to the way we experienced the war on CNN: night skies, burning oil wells, explosions in the distance, cuts to green, pixelated night vision, “enemies” virtually invisible, barely given faces, never voices. And they’re mostly referred to by slurs.
If that was commentary I would guess most viewers didn’t notice. It feels more like a continuation of how the war was seen at the time. However, there is something to be said for Lieutenant Colonel Nat Serling (Denzel Washington between DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS and THE PREACHER’S WIFE) having his troops pray and then immediately saying, Let’s kill ‘em all!”
And I do suspect it’s intentional that the fight is almost uncomfortably one-sided. They’re just driving along firing machine guns through rows and rows of human beings. The only tragedy, in their eyes, is when they mistakenly blow up one of their own tanks, killing their friend Boylar (Tim Ransom, OUTBREAK). The tank operator who fired, Patella (Sean Astin, ENCINO MAN), is racked with guilt, but Serling takes the blame. It was his orders. (read the rest of this shit…)
VAMPIRES is a cocky asshole of a horror-western strutting into John Carpenter’s filmography late, not giving a shit, rubbing everybody the wrong way. I’ve always dug it, though, and I think these days it’s more widely appreciated than it used to be.
