Submitted by SuperCrappyFuntime t3_11jew6i in movies
Other than films that are openly propagandistic (I'm looking at you, Triumph of the Will), what movies, in your eyes, serve largely as political or military propaganda despite being presented as entertainment? Just about anyone who's ever read an article on film has probably heard that Top Gun is basically a recruitment video for the Navy. What other films fit the bill?
(Note: As an American who watches mostly American movies, the films I'm going to name will naturally skew towards being American propaganda, but feel free to add films from other regions, as well.)
A few that i can think of off the top of my head:
Black Hawk Down - An adaptation of Mark Bowden's non-fiction book recounting the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, the film largely downplays the legitimate grievances the locals had against the American and allied UN forces, largely presenting the battle as absolute good vs. mindless evil. The film also downplays or eliminates the part played in the battle by allies such as Pakistan and Malaysia.
Said one Malaysian commander:
>Malaysian movie-goers will be under the wrong impression that the real battle was fought by the Americans alone, while we were mere bus drivers to ferry them out."
It should be noted that the film was released mere months after 9/11, when American jingoism was at a zenith. The public may not have had an appetite for a movie that questioned the absolute righteousness of an American military venture. According to actor Brendan Sexton, the script did include "hard questions of the US regarding the violent realities of war and the true purpose of their mission in Somalia", but these scenes were cut prior to release.
As for the filmmakers' response to criticisms upon the film's release, producer Jerry Bruckheimer made an appearance on the Fox News program The O'Reilly Factor and blamed the pushback on "political correctness".
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Zero Dark Thirty - Made with the cooperation of the Central Intelligence Agency, the film follows the efforts of a CIA analyst and others to find Osama bin Laden in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks. Besides the usual complaints about movies based on true events, such as using composite characters to combine two or more real-life characters, the film has been criticized for seemingly justifying enhanced interrogation techniques, a.k.a. torture. The film frames torture as a necessary evil that yields results. However, in the wake of the War on Terror, the use of torture as an effective interrogation technique has been largely debunked, instead yielding a mix of faulty intelligence or things that were already known to the intelligence community thanks to traditional intelligence-gathering means (e.g. signals intelligence, spies, covert agents, etc).
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Patriot's Day - A film covering the events surrounding the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombings. Besides the protagonist being a fictional character who Forrest Gump's his way into every major event in the hours and days following the bombings, one scene that smacks of propaganda is the scene where one of the suspect's wives asks for a lawyer during an interrogation. She is denied a lawyer. To her response that she "has rights", she is told that she "ain't got sh*t". I can't help but feel this was meant to be a fist-pumping scene, 'America, f*ck yeah!" moment, when in reality we are seeing an American citizen being denied a fundamental right.