MovieBob said:
Act of Valor
MovieBob aims his attention at the epic Navy recruiting film Act of Valor.
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Good, fair treatment of the material. I see this movie as an experiment. It's not meant to propagandize (ie, sway the opinions of the masses) as much as it's meant to appeal to already-fans of this kind of thing, and see if it takes.
And on another hand, I really have no problem with the military working to ensure a mostly-positive spin in Hollywood appearances. What they do is usually not very action-filled, and when it is, it's not "fun" or "pretty." It's flat-out ugly. They're going to get plenty of negative spin because what they do involves
killing people. (In addition to the statistically
extremely uncommon scandalous stuff we hear so much about lately.)
An army has to do awful things, and the public
needs men able and willing to do those things. Often, we only hear/talk/care about what they do when it goes
wrong. Really think about this:
1. We have a military so that we don't all have to deal with all of the awful things they have to do.
2. Because we don't have to deal with those awful things, we forget about them... or at least lose perspective on them.
3. We make unreasonable demands about how they do/don't do those awful things we originally tasked them to do.
4. They don't get it done, so it either doesn't get done or it falls back to us.
5. We decide to have a military, so that we don't have to deal... and so on.
Running PR for an organization like the military must be an absolute
nightmare, because even on the
best days, you're an organization whose job it is to
kill lots of people(or at least stay prepared to do so). Seems to be that job would be impossible without a little "hero porn" and a bit of preemptive damage control.