G.I. INSane

Last night I came home sometime past ten, and remembered only then that the mattress cover was still in the washing machine. Shit, I thought, it will take an hour or so for it to dry properly. Ok, let's see what's on tv in the meantime...

Nothing... nothing... Renaissance, already saw that one - btw, it's good... - G.I. Jane. Oh well, what the hell, I've seen it already but...
Well, it ticked me off. Badly. I've been on IMDB looking for more details, comments, stuff. On one side, more than one liked the citations from D.H. Lawrence:

Self Pity

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

which is both tender and tough, nice bit of poetry, nails it perfectly. But, on the other end, there was a very long list of enthusiastic comments on how close to reality most of the movie is, how good the director is at conveying the message, how exceptionally good is Demi Moore performance (exceptionally in the real sense, many claimed not to be fans of Demi in general). Me, I think adherence to reality is average for Ridley Scott movies that involve shooting, which means more or less not much. I'll have one cheap shot about that and then move on to more relevant stuff: Demi is visited by the doctor, who says: you are halfway through to being a wreck: tendinitis, huge loss of body fat, jungle rot on your foot, and she stopped menstruating as well, which is not unusual for women under heavy physical or psychological stress. Still, about five minutes after, Demi is doing situps while hanging upside down from some undefined structure, maybe a boiler, and the size of her breasts does not exactly match the idea of a stressed woman whose body fat was just drained out by sheer exhaustion. (yes, I know. I said it was a cheap shot)

Someone compared this movie with Alien. Please, please, please. Sigourney Weaver is way more convincing than Demi Moore as a fighter, she doesn't even need to shave her hair to look tough, and the alien idea is way more fascinating than tough women in kaki doing special ops missions. Which takes me to the core of what ticked me off badly in this movie.

The final real battle presents us with some fine american heroes who try and challenge dangerous foes, battling to secure safe return to their buddies, and bravely waiting for their commander to join them after being separated in action, because their motto is: you never leave your people behind. All nice and good.

Oh, I forgot. The mission of which the SEALs cadets are part is intended to rescue a satellite (not clear whether it's a spy satellite or not, some sort of military implement anyway) which has fallen down from the sky... in Libia. It's actually an armed intrusion in a sovereign country (whether you like Gheddafi or not), and the SEALs, including the noble commander, think nothing of shooting enemy soldiers who, as far as the movie shows, are regular grunts working the beat, little more than police patrols. They happen to carry RPGs, but none cares to shoot a rocket at the american soldiers. The proud commander gets two bullets, arm and leg, and is valiantly pulled out of the mine field the american soldiers prepared to welcome the pursuing soldiers by none else than Demi Moore. Twenty to thirty soldiers buy it in the meantime, notably not one of the americans gets as much as a scratch ("buy it" meaning to die - this being the military jargon to say that someone rests under two meters of dirt, or "bought a farm").

So the heroic deeds that the brave SEALs do are basically black ops, stuff that is probably (probably because I don't know the details of the laws covering these cases) considered illegal, the kind of stuff you send double o seven to do, and deny that it ever happened if someone finds out. That might be realistic, but consider the relationship with the rest of the movie, which is along the lines of: everyone has freedom of choosing how to live his or her life, no matter if a bra is needed or not, military hierarchies should be sensitive to the issue of sexual discrimination, blah blah... btw we don't give a fuck who else we have to kill for whatever menial purpose, such as recovering some high technology we happened to drop outside our borders, they are just cannon fodder we use for show, and a good replacement for the "real training" mission we were about to carry out in the Mediterranean sea.

Just now some funny coincidences struck me: Mediterranean, Libia, americans, stuff dropping from the sky. My limited knowledge of Italian recent history (yes, I admit that, I don't know shit of what has happened in my home country in the last sixty+ years) rings a couple of bells, Ustica and Sigonella (Achille Lauro, anyone?), but that needs a lot more researching into before I can say any more without sounding just stupid.

Leaving aside any consideration on the specific american vs rest of the world topic, the point is that, just like in Black Hawk Down, Ridley Scott does a nice clean job of presenting the american side as the righteous one, even when the situation is at least blurry when it comes to right and wrong, and american heroes seem more or less invincible. More to the point, one side gets a good characterization, a plot, actual people, the other gets only shooting targets or inept enemies. That sounds just like propaganda, dehumanizing the enemy while trying to make you cry about your officers citing poetry and your grunts becoming all for women rights and respect. Frankly, I cannot remember another couple of movies so embarassingly... mmm what's the best word for this? racist? since John Wayne was shooting Indians in the Wild West... should I say Native Americans? Well not if you watch the movies, I'm not referring to Geronimo, Sitting Bull or Red Cloud, I'm referring to the savages attacking the good ole pale faces, scalping and torturing whenever they could. Pity they learnt scalping from some guy from Great Britain, who used to do that back in the 13th century... have to dig up that name too...

End of story, I'll not waste my time watching any other Ridley Scott movie. I loved Blade Runner, Alien and Thelma and Louise, and The Gladiator is also a great movie, one in which he manages to do exactly the opposite, both sides are nicely described, the characters seem almost real, you can feel sympathy, of a sort, even for the evil Emperor... but the only other good movie I've seen is American Gangster. Seems like the best of Scott's production is in the remote past.