For The 10 Year Anniversary of 9/11 LFM Presents a New Series: Terror Watch

By Jason Apuzzo. With the 10-year anniversary of 9/11 approaching, I thought today would be a good time to launch a new series here at Libertas that I’ve been intending to do for a while, called Terror Watch. Terror Watch will join our other ongoing Libertas series (Invasion Alerts, Cold War Updates, Sword & Sandal Reports) and will cover the new wave of films, TV series, video games and even graphic novels dealing with the War on Terror.

The very fact that we’re able to do such a series is representative of a gradual and welcome change that’s taken place in Hollywood and popular culture over the past several years, a change whereby positive depictions of the War on Terror as a just and necessary cause are no longer considered taboo in entertainment circles. This change has been building for several years now (and has already been rippling through science fiction for quite a while), although it was accelerated considerably this past May by Navy SEAL Team 6’s successful mission against Osama bin Laden – an event that appears to have semi-officially opened a new chapter in Hollywood’s willingness to depict the struggle against terrorism as a vital activity.

And although one might be tempted to treat this development as coming too late to affect the public’s morale regarding the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, my sense is that how history perceives those conflicts is still very much up for grabs, especially for younger Americans – and so this new trend is one that I very much welcome. This does not mean, of course, that all of the projects we’ll be discussing will be very good – I suspect quite a few may be dreadful – but I advise people to keep an open mind. Certainly several recent projects – The Devil’s Double and Four Lions, most notably – have really been superb, and overall I think there is reason for optimism.

Why optimism, you might ask? Because Hollywood isn’t as dominated as it used to be by the Baby Boomers.

For his Washington Times article today entitled, “Hollywood AWOL in War on Terrorism,” my colleague Christian Toto kindly asked me to comment on Hollywood’s overall reaction, ten years on, to 9/11 and the War on Terror. Here is what I said:

Jason Apuzzo, conservative filmmaker and editor of Libertas Film Magazine, says politics clearly played a role in Hollywood’s initial reaction to 9/11.  “Their primary response [to 9/11] was to ignore it,” Mr. Apuzzo says. But that appears to be changing, witness the upcoming film on Osama bin Laden’s death at the hands of Navy SEALs due for release next year, as well as director Peter Berg’s adaptation of “Lone Survivor,” a film detailing the hunt for a Taliban leader.  “As the baby boomers start to retire off the scene in Hollywood, it’s becoming less of a factor,” Mr. Apuzzo says of the industry’s politically charged greenlighting process. “Younger people are not as hesitant about dealing with this issue.”

Many people nowadays believe that the Obama Presidency is the primary reason behind whatever change of heart there’s been in Hollywood of late regarding the War on Terror, and there is no doubt some truth in this. Yet while I’m sure that Obama’s Presidency – and specifically his successful management of the bin Laden raid – plays some role here, my sense is that this change was likely coming regardless, due to the gradual changeover of the industry to a younger (i.e., non-Baby Boomer) generation. By my experience, the younger Hollywood generation – and this includes the independent filmmaking world – is much less ideologically driven than the Boomers were, and are far less conflicted about the current war than was the Vietnam generation.

So this is ultimately why I’m optimistic: the people dominating Hollywood today are not the same people who were running the industry 10 years ago right after the 9/11 attacks. They are, instead, a generation driven by a desire to simply make careers for themselves – rather than to fight proxy culture-wars through the cinema, as their parents’ generation so often did.

So without further ado, let’s take a look at some of the War on Terror projects that are heading our way down the tracks …

• One of the forthcoming projects I’m most excited about is something called Shadow Runner, to which Thor’s/Red Dawn’s Chris Hemsworth is currently attached. According to Deadline Hollywood, the inspiration for this project was:

… an incident in which an Israeli assassination team targeted a Hamas leader whom the Israelis believe murdered several soldiers and helped stockpile Iranian-made missiles. He was tracked to Dubai, and the Israelis managed to smuggle in an entire 17-person hit team to take him out in the corridor of a five-star hotel. The operatives were captured on a hotel security camera trailing after the victim, reemerging and getting on the elevator after he was killed. I’m told that the film won’t replicate those events, but Hemsworth will lead an elite team of operatives who take on impossible tasks.

Whether this means Hemsworth will be leading a Mossad anti-terrorist team, or a U.S. team (Delta Force, anyone?), or some generalized international team isn’t clear  – but I like the concept of Hollywood’s top rising star doing this sort of project. Regular Libertas readers know I’m a big fan of Hemsworth, and I suspect that if he does this film and it’s successful a lot of young male talent will want to follow in his footsteps with similar projects. We’ll definitely keep an eye out for this one …

• Another project I’m pumped about is something called Lone Survivor, being prepped now by director Peter Berg (Battleship, The Kingdom, Friday Night Lights) for Universal. Here’s what the Wall Street Journal reports about the project:

Universal is readying “Lone Survivor,” a script about a decorated SEAL who fought through a rout in the mountains of Afghanistan. … [Berg] co-wrote the script for “Lone Survivor,” which he will direct, based on a memoir by former SEAL Marcus Luttrell. For research, Mr. Berg embedded with a special-forces team at a remote base in Iraq near the Syrian border. Universal signed off on the project only after Mr. Berg agreed to first direct “Battleship,” a big-budget extrapolation of the board game property, slated for release next spring.

Nevertheless, Mr. Berg says “Lone Survivor” wouldn’t have been greenlighted had it not offered some commercial potential for the studio. “The idea of a good old-fashioned combat yarn, in which the politics are very clear—we support these men—was more appealing to them.” Unlike many of the portraits of soldiers at war presented in recent years, “Lone Survivor” is about “the core warrior spirit,” he said. “It’s an unabashed tribute to the courage of these men.” Production is scheduled to begin next spring.

I know that a lot of you liked Berg’s The Kingdom, and you could certainly feel the pro-military vibe of Battleship in that film’s recent trailer – although this particular project is feeling a bit more like Black Hawk Down. In any case, I like the attitude Berg is taking into this project, so again we’ll keep an eye on this one. No word yet on a cast.

• Jerry Bruckheimer recently set up a Navy SEALs drama at ABC; nobody’s saying much about it yet, but Bruckheimer has always come across to me as a mensch, so this project seems promising. The SEALs will also be getting some love soon in the new feature Act of Valor, due out from Relativity Media on February 17th (Presidents’ Day). Act of Valor is an indie production starring actual SEALs, and the film is being made with extensive cooperation of the military (the Wall Street Journal recently ran a large feature on the project here) and with a screenplay by 300’s Kurt Johnstad – so the film should presumably be worth taking a look at. Will the SEALs be able to act? Who knows? In any case, be sure to check out this nice little video below from the Wall Street Journal about the making of the film:

While on the subject of Navy SEAL movies made with military cooperation, of course, we’ve obviously got to talk about Kathryn Bigelow’s forthcoming bin Laden movie (called Kill bin Laden in several media reports). By now you’re probably familiar with the controversy over the film, which was set off by: 1) a Maureen Dowd column in which she boasted – carelessly, I suspect – that the film was receiving special insider access to details about the bin Laden raid, and that the film was somehow designed to bolster morale about Obama’s Presidency, along with; 2) Sony setting the film’s release date for October 12, 2012, three weeks prior to the Presidential election.

To make a long story short, I have doubts about several of the controversies associated with this film. For one, I strongly doubt Maureen Dowd has even the slightest comprehension of what ‘top level’ access even means in these matters; it’s very unlikely to me, for example, that Bigelow is even receiving the kind of access that Michael Bay had on the Transformers films. Having already been the first Hollywood director to photograph the B-2 bomber for a major Hollywood film (1998’s Armageddon), and having worked extensively with the military on films like Pearl Harbor, for the original Transformers in 2007 Bay was given unprecedented access to previously secretive, high-technology projects like the F-22 and F-117 advanced stealth fighters, V-22 Ospreys, along with A-10 Thunderbolt II ‘Warthogs’ and a special Lockheed AC-130s used for anti-Taliban raids in Afghanistan. Many of these aircraft appeared in Transformers for the very first time in a Hollywood production – and it’s not hard to understand why. As Bay put it succinctly at the time (in the director’s commentary on the Transformers DVD): “Why does the military let me use this stuff? Because they look good at what they do in my movies.” Transformers’ cast of military characters were also specially trained by active-duty Navy SEALs and Army Rangers; plus, off-duty, active-military personnel served as extras in the film, and extensive shooting was allowed at the Holloman Air Force Base and White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, standing in for Qatar.

Contra Ms. Dowd, I doubt strongly that Bigelow is getting that kind of access.

At the same time, I also doubt that with Bigelow fresh off a Best Director Oscar Sony will somehow be hovering over her shoulder dictating this film’s content – pressing her to turn the film into an Obama campaign commercial. Bigelow already is a powerful figure in the industry right now, her work on Hurt Locker having been strong enough to prevent her ex-husband from winning a seemingly surefire Oscar for Avatar. She simply has no incentive to tow the party line, here. As a side note, a family member of mine was actually consulted by Bigelow on a military matter related to one of her prior films, and my understanding is that she was both professional and punctilious. For these reasons and others, it seems very unlikely to me that she will be using this film as an occasion to propagandize on Obama’s behalf – particularly at the expense of the more compelling achievements of the SEALs.

At the same time, none of this means that the film will be good, or that I trust Sony, or that the film’s screenwriter Mark Boal (In the Valley of Elah, The Hurt Locker) will restrain himself from making political points where he can. For example, it’s easy to imagine Boal hewing to the line popular in certain circles that the Iraq War ‘took our eyes off the hunt for bin Laden’ for several years – the idea here being that our intelligence and defense services are unable to do two things simultaneously. (Did we ‘take our eyes off the Japanese’ while we fought the Germans?)

But this film doesn’t look like it even has a script yet – let alone a cast, or a finalized title – so I intend to hold my powder on all this until a lot more is known. In fact, Bigelow may have a difficult time meeting the film’s much-ballyhooed release date if some of these details don’t get worked out very soon. I’m also curious about her recent remarks that the film “integrates the collective efforts of three administrations, including those of Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama.” How much of that exactly is she planning to depict within 90-120 minutes?

My prediction is that the writing and research on this film will likely drag on, and we won’t actually see this film until December of next year.

• Meanwhile, Frank Miller’s Holy Terror graphic novel has a new poster out (see above). It looks like somebody spilled a can of tomatoes on it.

• The Social Network’s Jesse Eisenberg may soon be starring in a project for Sony called The Terrorist Search Engine. According to Deadline, this story is:

… based on a New York Magazine profile of a baby-faced counter-terrorism expert witness named Evan Kohlmann. Kohlmann was called “the Doogie Howser of terrorism” for his penchant for culling through jihadist videos, communiques and websites to unearth terror threats from all over the globe. By the time he was 23, Kohlmann’s convincing testimony led to the conviction of nearly two dozen defendants on terrorist charges.

It’s quite easy to imagine Eisenberg making magic with this sort of thing. We’ll see if this project gets off the ground – I’m hoping it does.

• Diane Kruger and Djimon Hounsou have a new film coming out called Special Forces, about a French journalist in Afghanistan who gets kidnapped by the Taliban. Check out the teaser trailer, which looks promising. The film opens in France on November 2nd; no word yet on the U.S. release.

• A movie that is looking unbelievably promising to me is Sacha Baron Cohen’s The Dictator, a satiric take on Saddam Hussein’s novel Zabibah and the King – and otherwise helpfully described by Paramount as telling “the heroic story of a dictator who risked his life to ensure that democracy would never come to the country he so lovingly oppressed.” The movie will feature Megan Fox, John C. Reilly, Anna Faris and Ben Kingsley.

Cohen is obviously hit-and-miss with his comedy, but I consider myself a fan and he really seems to be the perfect match for this type of material. My hope is that this film is able to have the kind of break-out impact that Chris Morris’ brilliant satire Four Lions never really had – in part, I suspect, due to that film’s lack of star power.

In any case, some great behind-the scenes photos have been emerging from the set of The Dictator. Check out The Dictator’s gold SUV, or The dictator with a goat and camels, or The Dictator’s palace/crib, or cheeky footage of a UN protest of The Dictator. Also: more cameos for the film have been announced, and check out photos of Megan Fox arriving on set. Yes!

• In other Mesopotamian dictator news, check out Dominic Cooper’s MTV interview for The Devil’s Double, as well as this interview he did with Collider, and you can also read a new interview with the real-life Latif Yahia. If you haven’t seen this film already, please go see it while it’s still in theaters! Govindini and I, along with Joe Bendel, all thought it was excellent – and Cooper’s performance is easily the most compelling aspect of the film. He’ll be Oscar nominated if there’s any justice at the Academy; there isn’t, of course, so he won’t be.

• I’m getting bad vibes about Showtime’s new series Homeland, starring Claire Danes. If you want to know why, check out this preview of the show – and Fox News is otherwise reporting that the Pentagon wasn’t too thrilled about the idea of basing a show around a soldier who’s potentially been turned into an Al-Qaeda operative (especially post-Fort Hood).

Here’s 24 and Homeland producer Howard Gordon talking about the series:

“In the collision of the war on terror, the story hasn’t been told of the price of 9/11 to this country — after Abu Ghraib, after Guantanamo, after two wars of questionable merit and the price to us.”

Really, Howard? The story hasn’t been told? Not in Rendition? Lions for Lambs? In the Valley of Elah? Syriana? Redacted? Hell, even V for Vendetta? Fahrenheit 9/11? The series debuts on October 2nd, just a few weeks after the 9/11 anniversary. Great timing, guys! Not that there’s ever good timing for something like this.

• In Video Game News, Battlefield 3 pre-orders are currently topping 1.25 million; make sure to check out the teaser trailer for Battlefield 3, along with 12 minutes worth of game play; also, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 recently held a huge convention; make sure to check out the trailer for Call of Duty 3; also: Ridley Scott, Jason Bateman and others will be contributing Call of Duty on-line video content. Jason Bateman?

• In other Terror Watch News: Strike Back on Cinemax (read Joe Bendel’s LFM review) is getting good ratings, and you can watch a clip from this week’s show; Ralph Fiennes’ War on Terror-styled Coriolanus has a new trailer, plus star Jessica Chastain (who currently has about 12 new films out) is out talking about the film, and Coriolanus is also showing now at the Toronto Film Festival; Ed Zwick will indeed be directing Vince Flynn’s American Assassin; the great Dale Dye (late of Falling Skies) will be creating a graphic novel about the bin Laden raid; check out the interesting plot for Ben Affleck’s Argo (about the Iranian hostage crisis), and there’s also been recent casting for that film (see here and here); Mission-Impossible: Ghost Protocol has a War on Terror-related plot, and there are some new images out of the film (here, here and here), a new poster of Tom Cruise in a hoodie, and executive producer J.J. Abrams has been talking up Tom Cruise’s stunts and the overall scale of the film in IMAX; and finally, plot details are being leaked for G.I. Joe 2: Retaliation, and it’s been confirmed that Bruce Willis and The Rock are in the cast. Whether that means the film will be any better than the last one is anybody’s guess …

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … with Megan Fox set to appear in Sacha Baron Cohen’s The Dictator, there was really no question who we’d be featuring today as our inaugural Terror Watch pin-up. This image above is from her recent Armani campaign. Other than eye-liner, I’m not sure what it’s intended to sell – nor does that seem to matter …

And that’s what’s happening to today in the (cinematic) War on Terror …

Posted on September 9th, 2011 at 9:02pm.