You can often find subtext in the way war is depicted in cinema at any given point in a generation, even though our last outright war was largely “interpreted” by incendiary documentaries more than narratives. “Iraq films” were not popular fair in mainstream cinema for most of duration of that conflict, and even when The Hurt Locker won Best Picture, it was among the least widely-seen films to ever do so. So now I wonder what subtext we’ll be able to look back at and unearth as we see films in the early 2010s engaging war on screen with high-end gimmickry…

Last October I told you about Thunder Run and expressed concern about the value of an entirely motion-capture CGI war film, even if it does feature an interesting trio in Sam Worthington, Gerard Butler, and Matthew McConaughey. Well the Simon West film is proceeding, as funding has been secured through Freedom Films and Paradox Entertainment (oh man, there’s even subtext in the production company names!) and Simon West will be able to follow up The Expendables 2 with the film. The film will shoot — which is to say “capture” — this summer for a 2013 release. It will tell the story of the American military’s three day effort to capture Baghdad at the beginning of the Iraq war.

I mentioned above the idea of more than one techie war film, as the other that comes to my mind is Ben Affleck’s Line Of Sight– an entirely 1st-person military flick. What’s interesting is that unlike West’s film, which will likely distance us from the combat by being animated, is that Affleck’s seeks to make it more immediate. And yet, both are snapping us into video game perspectives, with a producer on Thunder Run specifically stating that they hope to appeal to video game fans.

“The scope of the movie is going to feel huge and the goal is to appeal to the Call of Duty world. It’s not going to have a video game world feel but to have a stylized look to it.”

I will grant that even attempts at high-fidelity military films often have questionable motives and results, so it’s hard to entirely piss on this project, but it still weirds me out. How do you feel about real conflict being presented this way?

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Source |  Screenrant