Offensive, to put it mildly

Rating: 1/10 (7 May 2010)

I have to add my voice to the list of people who really disliked this movie. Imagine a German director making a movie in 1948. Imagine the director asking us to feel sympathy for the soldiers because it was very cold in Russia. (I'm not saying that the United States is a perfect analogy to Nazi Germany, because that would be a grotesque exaggeration.) I actually do have sympathy for all of those young Germans who lost their lives in WWII. But the rest of the world would be appalled to find that this was the take-home message from World War II for the Germans. Bigelow asks her viewers to feel this very emotion for Americans in Iraq.
If there were other scenes that provided a different take on the situation, the hot desert scene would be insignificant. But every Iraqi in the movie is used simply to show how sensitive an American is, or how afraid an American is, etc. The Iraqis are allowed no existence of their own, they are simply plot devices. Don't America's major critics see this?
Some have said that this movie isn't political. By this, they seem to mean that it doesn't criticize the war. This movie is in fact deeply political in that it completely objectifies the "enemy," and glorifies war as a potentially exciting escape from domesticity.