Stop Loss. Don't do it.
There's been many, many anti-war, anti-soldier movies out in the past few years - Redacted, Valley of Elah, Rendition, etc. Big flops the lot of them. I haven't really commented because there are so many others better at it. But this most recent, this Stop Loss, really pisses me off.
The other films show our troops as wife beaters, children killers, maniacs, blood-thirsty savages, etc and I figure most people see that for what it is: Insane propoganda.
Stop Loss just out and out lies about military contracts (but has all of the above as well). The family review site Plugged In does a great job of showing the film for what it is.
Unfortunately, Stop-Loss also concocts some false dilemmas and presents them in tandem with those above: What do you do with a military that targets individual soldiers returning from war, nabs them with a "back-door draft," turns them around and sends them right back into combat? And what about the Army's dubious "standard operating procedure" of ordering soldiers to pursue terrorist attackers, even when it's clear they're headed straight into an ambush? These policies sound irresponsible at best, unethical at worst. And they would be, if they were actually happening. Which is what Stop-Loss seems to want its audience to believe. But in both cases, filmmakers are preying on the military ignorance of most moviegoers to create a moral predicament where none exists.
To set the record straight: stop-loss is a real military policy that allows the armed forces to extend soldiers' service times beyond their original active-duty contracts. However, it's not the bait-and-switch tactic that this film makes it out to be. Every soldier knows it's a possibility from the moment he signs his contract. And rarely does it result in someone being deployed on two back-to-back combat assignments.
The same goes for the orders that send Brandon and his men directly into an ambush. While soldiers are expected to pursue terrorists who attack a checkpoint, they're expressly trained not to continue the pursuit into a danger zone like the one portrayed here. Technicalities, certainly. But if you don't already know these things, you're not at all likely to glean them from watching this film. So you're left with the impression that the military (and particularly its commander in chief) is suffering from a serious moral shortfall. Maddening. Who needs made-up problems when war presents more than enough real ones?
For families, of course, all this two-edged sword philosophy is something of a moot point, since violence, drunkenness and over-the-top profanity makes Stop-Loss more of an all-out loss.
If you've never read Plugged In, I recommend it even if you don't have kids.
So they lie about stop loss. The whole basis of the movie is a lie. A big lie to make America look bad, our President look bad, our military look really bad. Bastards.
What's great about this is that everyone is expecting Stop Loss to fail like the others. Though, the media and Hollywood blames the failures on America's being tired of this horrible war we shouldn't be in in the first place. Not, of course, on the fact that most Americans can't stand to see our soldiers treated in this disgusting manner. It makes us sick. Libertas has some good posts on that matter.
Just don't. Please. Whether you're American or British, let's not let this one be a hit either.
*UPDATE*
The Libertas review.
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