esbenpost

Watching this movie really made me sad. I did not feel sad on behalf of the characters however - but on the behalf of the movie itself, its corrupt values, and its sadistic goals. The recipe of this film is this: take an all-American Christian family, tear it apart, watch it suffer and die, and leave it in its grave to decompose. End of story. Nothing else. The film does not care in any way about the people it portrays - we do not at any moment feel sympathy with anyone in it and do therefore not share their suffering, but instead simply watch it from a distance - which is what sadism is all about. I don't know if anybody gets off on this - I do not, I just feel sad that a movie as this can pass on as art and that not even my favorite critic, Roger Ebert, can see through its rotten morals. "The King" tells us that the world is a dark and evil place, that people are dark and evil, and from the moment we meet the Christian Pasteur and his family we know what is going to happen: the movie is going to take a deep and dark revenge upon them for their false ideas. I have long gotten used to christians being portrayed like they are in this film - as judgemental fanatics, holier-than-thou republicans, world distant freaks and born-again losers. I can easily forgive such a (false) view if a film has heart, but this film hasn't. If you want to see a satanistic film (satanism in fact tells us that love is false and hate is real), go ahead and watch it, but if you enjoy it, well, you really should start worrying about yourself.

In America, WWS got good if not great reviews and was viewed upon as a realistic war-movie with a heart, set in the Hollywood tradition (read for example the Roger Ebert review). In Europe the critics were a lot more sceptic about the movie, they saw it as badly timed propaganda, filled with clichés and unnescessary violence. Personally I find myself in-between. The question I asked myself when I saw this movie is: what makes a hero, and under what circumstances is it allright to make war-movies as this which are plainly NOT anti-war. In WWS the message is clear: what makes you a hero is fighting for your comerades (be they American or North Vieatnamese) and your country. So - were the soldiers of Nazi Germany heroes ?? Can you be a hero if you're fighting on the wrong side ?? Today I think most people feel that the US Army's presence in Vietnam was unjust. The south-vietnamese regime they were fighting for was no worse and no better than the north-vietnamese they were fighting against. For the soldier though, this didn't matter. He was, as the movie states, fighting for himself, and his comrades. But for the viewers watching the movie, this SHOULD matter. WWS is not an anti-war movie. It gloryfies armed combat. But combat itself is not glorious, and dying for your comerades is - if it's not in the service of a just cause - meaningless. The both scary and fascinating thing about WWS is that it COULD have been about Nazi soldiers, or north Vietnamese, and it would still have had the same pathos and the same message - which is, again, not about right or wrong, but self-sacrifice.