Courage Under Fire

(Edward Zwick, USA, 1996)

Courage Under Fire belongs to a mid 1990s cycle of American films including Tony Scott’s Crimson Tide (1995) and Michael Bay’s The Rock (1996).

These are all basically gung-ho, patriotic films that extoll the essential goodness and rightness of America’s military war machine.

They try to moderate their message, however, by admitting that – just maybe – there have been a few occasional war crimes; perhaps there are one or two bad apple soldiers in the bunch; possibly, at stray moments, all this pent-up, aggro-macho violence goes just a little bit berserk.

But it’s all double-talk up there on the screen.

Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War (1990), for all its problems, had a more inclusive and incisive eye on the real issues. Then again, its auteur is still, in a deep sense, marked by the 1960s counterculture that he grew up with; whereas Bay didn’t, and Scott, if he did, has maybe-perhaps-possibly forgotten or disavowed it.

In case you can’t already tell, I dislike the political line of Courage Under Fire. But even more than that, I hate its laborious script (by Patrick Sheane Duncan, writer of Nick of Time [1995] and writer-director of The Pornographer [1994]), and thirtysomething Edward Zwick’s ponderous direction.

Plus all that twaddle about Lieutenant Colonel Serling (Denzel Washington) having to leave his family for while in order to work through buried traumas courtesy of the Gulf War!

Uninspired filmmaking never helps out a repugnant ideology.

© Adrian Martin September 1996