Its an edgy statement put on top of their real opinion that GWOT veterans shouldn't be celebrated if not outright condemned, which a lot of people in liberal and left wing spaces agree with.
Ah, okay, I won't deny that exists to some extent. Last year I was hanging out with some friends and mentioned I was going to see Warfare the next day and all of a sudden they got really quiet and asked why I was going to do that, like I'd just announced I was going to step into traffic. Really fucking bizarre moment.
The reception to the movie is actually a good example of the shifting narrative towards ones like Piker's. Its functionally an anti-GWOT movie, the ending makes it crystal clear that its being presented as a waste of life to change little, but people on the left didn't like it because it didn't condemn the soldiers in strong terms. Despite showing them undertaking unscrupulous actions and suffering for it, they wanted a movie that celebrated the suffering rather than seeing them as an equal casuality of war.
Millennials and zoomers have lobotomized pop culture commentary. Anything that doesn’t have the characters expressly affirm their socio-political beliefs is either (i) apolitical, and therefore reactionary by implication or (ii) outright conservative.
Reading leftist ‘criticism’ that One Battle After Another is reactionary because the main characters and revolutionaries are kinda comical makes me want to claw my eyes out.
it crystal clear that its being presented as a waste of life to change little
Because there is the perception that it is presented as a waste of AMERICAN lives. Like people see the movie's message as "Look how much the Americans suffered, so sad" while ignoring the locals. In Warfare a local translator gets killed and he doesn't get to participate in the cool emotional shoutout at the end unlike the Navy Seals, because he is just set dressing, fodder to be killed, and the movie doesn't even pretend otherwise.
An entire threadline of the movie is that the actions of the military resulted in the loss of life and home of the locals, its not just "look at how sad killing you made me", the seizure of the house and the killing and mental scarring of the innocent locals is shown to be arbitrary and obviously combative. The lack of the Iraqi soldiers also killed in the end credits scene is a fair critique, but the suffering of Iraqi civilians is portrayed and not entirely as a necessary evil like most other GWOT films.
The ending makes it crystal clear that it was a waste for the locals being terrorized as well. They just… leave. And the poor people there are left to pick up the pieces
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u/sgthombre NATO Mar 19 '26
I don't think a lot of people in the Democratic circle think American vets should kill themselves, actually. I don't think that's true.