Film Reviews by None

This is excellent. The kit in this is very accurate. A proper good war film, way ahead of a lot of Western stuff made in the same period.

I was extremely pleased that this film has received such accolades as I saw it and thought ‘Wow! This is really cool but I bet no one else likes it’. What really appealed to me was the deeply messed up and bent out of shape nature of the soldiers and how they had to sell their psyches in order to get through the war. It’s a truly modern tale of today’s type of military conflict and rates along side the excellent ‘Generation Kill’.

If you want big battles and big body counts go else where. If you want a sustained, dissonant crawl though a modern war then ‘Hurt Locker’ is the muts nuts.

Very, very disappointing. End of. I did write quite a long review for this film but I scrapped it on the grounds that enough time has been wasted with this effort as it is. If you're really stuck then watch it. Otherwise get Axis of War out instead

I like to imagine some Russian Afghan War veteran watching this and wetting himself laughing at the irony of it all. The Soviets go into Afghanistan to counter the threat of Islamic fundamentalism spreading within their borders and are undermined and ultimately defeated by the clandestine involvement of the USA! Fast forward some twenty odd years and what do we have now? Ironic or what?

Perhaps it was the fact that Afghanistan reminded Congressman Wilson of Texas so much that caused him to fund this covert war. After all they’re both hot and arid deserts, full of dangerous religious fundamentalists where everyone has a gun. Perhaps, as a prequel, we could have Charlie Wilson’s Other War where we see the fun loving statesman funding anti-democratic death squads in El Salvador and Nicaragua as they murder, torture, rape and pillage their way around Central America?

But the film! Ah yes, the film….Sorry. Rant over. It’s actually quite a good film if you willingly suspend your moral objections towards US foreign policy/cultural imperialism. Hanks is good as always and Philip Seymour Hoffman as agent Gust Avrakotos is fantastic. Julia Roberts is annoying but then I think she’s supposed to be. Making a little more of the obvious links between the situation in Afghanistan then and now would have made the film a better, more balanced effort, I think. All in all not a wasted experience. Flawed but worth watching and certainly a good film for generating debate.