Nowadays Dr Strangelove?

Rating: 6/10 (29 May 2017)

For movies whose screenplay is supposed to be relevant (which are... all of them except the trashiest of entertainment) dubbing can be as damaging to the original as a tone-deaf song cover. In Italy (and in most central-southern Europe) since the dawn of commercial cinema distributors have developed a very capable dubbing industry: unfortunately I find that this "art" a lot of times does ruin the original. Why don't we have Mozart's requiem in Japanese? Isn't there a relevant market for classical music? Of course any music student is having shivers down his spine at the idea... because it's a stupid idea. But well... some had this idea 70 years ago and apparently none felt like it was worth to change things since.
As I doubt producers do care with what their paying customers do, I believe writers, directors and actors should require that their works will not be dubbed. But possibly they don't care either... And this tells a lot about the average education of these categories...
Anyway, in a movie like this one it's hard to pass on some stupid writing: we are talking about war, about international politics and about our world. And while we are used to listen to any possible position on the news or on the internet it's hardly bearable for me to see certain extreme levels of unintentional idiocy in a movie. To my sensitivity some phrases felt as "smart & funny" as laughing at people with handicaps. Whatever... I account this to an unprofessional translation and actually the movie improved a lot after the first 10-20 minutes (that's where I had a hard time with the script: did they switch translator later?). What I felt insulting slowly became surreal, sarcastic and grotesque: in a good and almost sophisticated way I'd say.
To the actual movie now:
This is the story of how a decorated general accepts the "publicly accepted" tasks of winning a war against terror, not losing resources, disengage conflicts and earn civil trust in modern day Afganistan.
Brad Pitt is the lead and is out of his depth imho: I can't simply believe for 1 second that he is a (dumb) 60 something modern-day successful military. Nonetheless he tries hard enough for me to forget about this and pretend he's what he's supposed to be. The budget (except the one for actors I guess) feels basic in terms of production but photography, scenes and costumes are as good as needed (where did they spend 60M $? Are military equipment scenes that expensive?).
While not a great accomplishment "War machine" shows well some things and does so without any docu feel or paternalistic "I know it better" tone:
The uncoordinated (and ultimately pointless) endeavors of international politics;
The inability (or impossibility?) of the military to adapt to a world that functions with principles different than "strenght" and "order";
The media/cultural machine as an entity much more powerful (and yet harder to control) in determining "things" than any actual political initiative;
The egoistic perspective of American (and worldwide) business, bureaucracy, military when coping with conflicts of interest possibly influencing YOUR OWN career;
The reputation of powerful men as pure propaganda to instill trust and maintain control: real men are actually less capable and ultimately less powerful than we're led to believe.