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Originally Posted by joea
Well said Skybird-I think so for every war. This happens sometimes in fiction too, contrast the ending of the Lord of the Rings films with Star Wars, no I'm serious. Both against really evil enemies (thouigh both with nuances, even Sauron in Tolkien's writings started out wanting to do good) but LOTR had a very bittersweet ending with a lot of loss and changes from the conflict. You see a little of that in US films outside of Vietnam films, notably Thin Red Line and Band of Brothers.
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A Thin Red Line is so much more than just a war movie. It's almost a religious meditation about so much more than just war. War is just one part of the roundely that "it" all is. I hold that film in very high esteem, it is one of my all time favourites, and the - by far - best of all of Malick's movies, imo.
Band of Brothers also was very good, though obviously setting the scope for a different fix. Although similiar in style and the visual way in which it was relaised to Private ryan, the one thing that imo makes Brothers better than Ryan is that Ryxan at the end has this Hollywood typical timing for a - though pathetic, which makes it even worse - happy ending, the P-47 I think it was sweeping in and cleaning the enemy, and the heroic Captain having given his life to acchieve this ending. Brothers just ran out at the end, showed a slow, nonsensational shift from combat to occupation and relative peace. - Indeed a very very good series, one of the best pieces about WWII ever shot. I find it remarkable that an American crew could ha<ve made a film about American "heroes" withgout either hacking away at them or gloryfying them, simply paionting them as humans without all that usual pathetic glory&patriotism posture on display that you usually expect from a Hollywood movie.
The BBC made a good and probably realistic movie about war as well, the Bosnia war. The film was called "Warriors", and is already a bit older. Sober, tragic, showing the inner conflicts of the British soldiers being eaten up by the
impossible and even shameful situation the UN's idiocy had put them into. "Auslandseinsatz" reminded me of that a bit.
Armies' and soldiers' job is not to improve civilian infrastructure and to rebuild schools. Their business is to wage war when there is war, or to train for fighting a war when there is peace currently. Europe has forgotten that. The madnesses we got ourselves entangled in since the Balkan wars, is a direct result of this. The psychic conflicts the actors suffer from in "Auslandseinsatz", also is a result from this illusion. Maybe a well-meant illusion, but still an illusion. The part on "well-meant", actually means nothing in this, it causes no good effects. What causes effects, bad ones, is the illusion.