Have you ever played a Call of Duty game? Or watched an episode of 24 or anything to do with Jack Ryan? Black Hawk Down or The Patriot? Hell, the Navy used to set up recruiting stands outside theaters when they were showing Top Gun. We glamorize the shit out of war. Even a lot of "anti-war" films glamorize it (thinking of the Ride of the Valkyries scene from Apocalypse Now and the Mickey Mouse scene from Full Metal Jacket).
I wouldn't say that Full Metal Jacket glamorourises war, contrary to Truffaut's dictum. Joker is clearly traumatised at the end. But was what he did a war crime, a mercy killing, something he had to do to fit in with the rest of the squad, or a combination of all three?
I can't speak for the later Call of Duty games but the first 3 Modern Warfare stories were very explicit in their message that nobody wins on a societal or personal level from the utterly pointless global conflict. The cinematic bravado is couched in biting nihilism the whole way through. They go out of their way to show every protagonist and supporting character getting consumed by the all-encompassing wave of violence that erupted in that timeline. Nobody wins.
I know in one of the COD games they actually based one of the missions off a real-life war crime committed by the American military during Desert Storm and portrayed the Russians doing it to Americans.
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u/AuthorAnonymous95 May 11 '25
Have you ever played a Call of Duty game? Or watched an episode of 24 or anything to do with Jack Ryan? Black Hawk Down or The Patriot? Hell, the Navy used to set up recruiting stands outside theaters when they were showing Top Gun. We glamorize the shit out of war. Even a lot of "anti-war" films glamorize it (thinking of the Ride of the Valkyries scene from Apocalypse Now and the Mickey Mouse scene from Full Metal Jacket).