The movie industry no longer aspires to portray genuine heroism—even though that’s precisely what audiences want to see.
A spate of movies about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terror came out last year, all of them hostile to U.S. involvement and all of them box-office flops. At the time there was a certain amount of soul-searching in the media as to why, when most Americans told pollsters they thought the Iraq war, at least, had been a mistake, they didn’t seem to want to go and see movies that sought to show them just how great a mistake it had been. The New York Times critic A.O. Scott cited what he called “the economically convenient idea that people go to the movies to escape the problems of the world rather than to confront them,” but acknowledged the possibility that America’s opposition to the war “finds its truest expression in the wish that the whole thing would just go away, rather than in an appetite for critical films.”
