Why do WWII films receive a better reception than Iraq war films...

Why do WWII films receive a better reception than Iraq war films? Is because the Nazi were the epitome of an evil villain? Or is the fact that time has erased any of the war crimes that the Allies possibly committed?

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WW2 aesthetics look better on film than grainy gulf war era shit.

name one good Iraq war film

Because it's more interesting. It wasn't a war for oil

Nam can look good but usually they cram in too much leftist hippy propaganda.

Maybe they're just made better
Or it's because Jews run Hollywood

Fuck off neckbeard

There's a lot less political/moral ambiguity involved. The axis were clearly evil, so even when you take into the account the atrocities committed and planned by the allies (Red Army Rape Rampage, Britain bombing German civilians, American firebombing of Tokyo, etc.) they pale in comparison to what the Axis did. There are clear villains, so everyone less awful than those villains is automatically a hero.

It makes it easier to cheer on American, Soviet, and British characters with minimal guilt (unless you're watching a movie specifically about the atrocities committed by the allies, which are relatively rare afaik).

>a war for oil

This is probably b8, but it wasn't a war for oil. It was a poorly-planned war launched because of fears that Saddam's government would simply become the new shelter for Al Qaeda (as the Taliban had been prior to 2002), because all available intelligence at the time pointed to the Iraqi government having WMDs (and as it turned out, they did, just not nuclear ones), and because George W Bush bought whole-heartedly into the silly notion that it's America's job to go around knocking down dictatorships and installing democracy, even though we've only successfully done that on three or four different occasions in our entire history.

Also the Axis were capable and equal, sometimes even superior foes (for that sweet underdog feel)

Every war fought after WW2 involving a western party was some unbalanced or half-assed shitfest

Because the military technology of WW2 is more fun to watch than modern weaponry.

Also the fact that it's full blown war instead of the counter-insurgent shit that we see in most movies that take place in the Middle East.

Because the Irag wars were very recent and had round the clock news coverage so it's harder to romanticize them.

News about WWII was heavily filtered and propagandised and most people that fought it in are dead or senile now so it's easier to polish over the ugly parts.

heck of a lot more dead in the WWs

^

I agree!

World War 2 was actually really unbalanced in favor of the Allies. The industrial capacity of the United States alone outmatched that of every Axis country combined. It's just that the Axis (specifically Germany) got incredibly lucky from 1939 to 1941. Nearly everything that could have gone right for them did go right, if you look at the forces available to them and their resources they really shouldn't have been able to defeat France and successfully invade the USSR (pushing nearly to Moscow) practically on their own.

Generation Kill

Because WW2 was a more noble war than the Iraq war.

>the other guy is b8
At any rate,

Has there even been a good Iraq movie? lol

World War II is much more dramatic. The motivations of the leaders are really grandiose, there are bold ideas sweeping up entire nations into a frenzy, and it's a battle to the death all around. It also had dramatic, explosive conclusions that fit well with a movie (American troops marching into Rome, De Gaulle liberating Paris, Hitler committing suicide in his bunker as the Soviets close in, the atomic bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

The Iraq War is a pretty mundane, one-sided war fought for mundane reasons.

Three Kings

War vs brown sand people with comparatively primitive weaponry isn't interesting.

That's only in hindsight, though. At the time there was a very real fear that the Germans and Japanese were unstoppable juggernauts. It's easy for us to look back and say "well of course the Soviets and Americans won the war, they were producing more tanks and ships in a month than the Germans or Japanese could in a year!".

In the big picture Sure, but thats not what a WW2 movie usually focuses on. Most of movies look at a specific Battle, where they paint (at least german) battle prowess and capabilities as fearsome and something hard to overcome. Makes for giid drama. Also explains why there are no WW2 action dramas with the italians as foes.

Didn't The Turd Locker get some genuine praise? I just thought it was decent

I feel that ww2 films are instant gold and there is hardly any controversy attached to them.

WW2 is just easier to process than Iraq.

Conventional war, clear beginning and end, clear enemy. No ambiguity.

Iraq is a mess 'winning' itself remains an ambiguous conflict. Not to mention it's still too 'raw' for many americans - ie nobody wants to watch a movie about the event that killed their friend form high school, ect. They see this stuff on tv everyday: they don't want to go to the movies to see it too.

>Also explains why there are no WW2 action dramas with the italians as foes.

lmao

>movie begins
>British tanks advance
>Italian tanks put it in reverse and get out of there as fast as possible
>roll credits

Turd Locker has zero pull stemming from the conflict itself and is all character bullshit. I can't even remember what generic middle east deployment the setting was.

Which is funny because as an Arab Nationalist, Hussein was a brutal asshole, but he kept a lot of Islamist extremists in check.

Also the war was about the US realizing they could no longer trust the Saudis so they thought they could take out the least popular middle east dictator and install a newcUS friendly Democratic government and have an instant middle east ally.

Only it turns out you can't just install a democracy and we created a huge power vacuum that allowed ISIS to grow.

Which is exactly the quagmire that Bush Sr. was talking about when he stopped the first war at the Kuwait border.

It did. But I think it made less than 20 million in domestic box office.

There have been a lot of great movies on war on terror related subjects - but only Zero Dark Thirty and AMerican Sniper have made any real box office money

Top kek

ZDT can barely be seen as a war movie and Enemy at the Gates: Modern Warfare still doesnt make the blurry mess of Desert conflicts any more interesting

Because WWII was far more dangerous and more evenly matched.

>post credit scene of Italian tank crew dead of dysentery after soiling themselves to death

Not a movie, but the miniseries Generation Kill was pretty decent.

for a 'war' movie, i think people like the enemy to be at least wearing a uniform - has a bit of a 'bad guy' feel when the people you're fighting look identical to the people you're 'saving'

Reminds me of the GOAT Churchill quote
(at a dinner with Ribbentrop, German foreign minister)

>Ribbentrop: If a war begins between our countries, the Italians will be on our side.
>Churchill: That's only fair, we got stuck with them the last time.

This. WWII was the last classical war.

Clear front lines, Nation vs. Nation, modern yet still conventional warfare.

Makes for a good, romantic war drama.

True. And they barely fire a shot or overcome any tense battle situation. Because the conflict is uninteresting, bland and undramatic. Compare it to what Band of Brothers got going on. (Not saying one is better than the other, just how they frame their settings)

>This. WWII was the last classical war.
>Clear front lines, Nation vs. Nation, modern yet still conventional warfare.

What about the Korean War?

>(((noble war)))
They are both incredibly Jewish

Vietnam was is a huge fucking question mark where there isnt a clear "winner" and it makes a better scene for a war film.

>Why

MUH HOLOHOAX MUH 6 GARRILLION

>I'm a neocon/neoliberal and proud
Literally kill yourself

>Nazi characters are portrayed in a sympathetic way
>Americans show surrendering soldier mercy
>Same soldier later mercilessly kills two main characters
What does it mean?

throw some ww2 kino my way if you've got any lads - I'll start

It means that war makes people do horrible things. There's a scene in that same movie where two German soldiers are clearly trying to surrender and the Americans shoot them anyway, laughing as they do it.

Britain bombing German Civilians.

So, just like every side did? Okay, neat. It's not retroactively a war crime.

Look up the definition of 'Total War'. Protip. It means no fucking target is off limits. As soon as you pull your punches, you lose. There is no morality in war, the victor decides what is and what isn't moral. Britain had the lowest war crimes because they were pussy bitches about 'honor' and 'gentlemen' bullshit. This was followed by USA, then France, China then Germany and finally Japan.

The Korean War had the appearance of a classical war, but it was a Proxy War in drag. The US and USSR blew up a civil conflict to keep one another from gaining a foothold in a potentially valuable piece of Asian real estate. And there was no clear victor.

The Koreans ended up with a divided peninsula, the US ended up with a seemingly pointless military campaign and the Soviets eroded diplomatic relations with China in a way that never really recovered.

It was a war that basically everybody lost.

>there isnt a clear "winner"
one side completely retreats from the country and the president they were supporting flees with them
other side renames others capital city after their leader
>isnt a clear "winner"
>clear "winner"
>"winner"
theres certainly a clear loser though

>Moslim speak
>"What?"
>More Moslim speak
>"What?"
>Even more Moslim speak
>*Bang*
>"What'd he say? What'd he say?"
>"Look, I washed for supper!" Xdddd
Sounds like those two Germans had it coming

Relax. I'm not saying that it was the wrong decision, just that morally it was a horrible thing to do.


>Britain had the lowest war crimes because they were pussy bitches about 'honor' and 'gentlemen' bullshit. This was followed by USA, then France, China then Germany and finally Japan.

Did you finish reading my post, or did you just stop at the word "Britain", pin a poppy to your shirt, and start typing? The whole point of my post was that despite the atrocities committed by the allies, the Axis were far worse, making them "the good guys" relatively speaking because they had a certain amount of restraint.

The problem with his chemical wmds were that they were sold to him by the US and in the past in Iraq they've used them to genocide ethnic subsets of brown citizens they didn't like. Without American intervention it was bound to be another massacre.

Steamboat Willy and the Jew stabber are different people. Spielberg fucked up by giving everybody the same historically inaccurate haircut.

Because you lost 'nam and all wars since were clusterfucks too complicated for both the participants and the average viewer.

I want a good WWI film

>and the Soviets eroded diplomatic relations with China in a way that never really recovered

It's kind of funny because there's a relatively popular theory out there that Stalin helped instigate the war to ensure that PRC-American reconciliation never happened. Completely backfired in the long run.

>It was a war that basically everybody lost.

The Japanese economy got jumpstarted by it though, so at least somebody won.

>wake up you guyz
I am not. I am morally ambiguous as to the cause.

WWII was total war, nothing since has come even close. The worlds powers (except the US) essentially were fighting for their very existence, and due to the circumstances of Germany and Japan, they only had a chance at winning if they went balls deep, no half measures which only emphasized how much was at stake.

Gallipoli is pretty good. It would be nice to see a modern, big-budget movie about Verdun or the Eastern Front though that treats the whole thing the way Saving Private Ryan/Enemy at the Gates/Downfall treated WWII. I'm a little worried that shit like Battlefield 1 is going to give people the wrong idea of what the war was like.

Iraq is a bit more morally complex
It's a lot easier to cheer on Allies gunning down Nazis
In Iraq we're not entirely sure who our enemies are, and who are the good and bad guys
That sort of film doesn't have the same mass appeal

You can dress it up with all the glory, ideology and morality you want, but war is only about resources and territory.

Either protecting yours or obtaining someone else's.

When will we get the inevitable biopic and who should play him?

>German bloke kills Jewish bloke
>Upham and German bloke see each other
>Upham lowers his weapon and German bloke ignores him and walks past him
You ever wonder what would've happened if everyone in the big final battle just stopped shooting and lowered their guns and thought about what they were doing?

Does anybody know if there's a good Japanese movie about their government deciding to declare war on the US? It would be nice to get their view of the insane mentality that made them take the leap from "we need to invade China" to "we can't keep fighting in China without American oil" to "instead of withdrawing from China, let's attack America".

The ideology and morality is about how to control and protect resources and territory though. It's not just an irrelevant add-on, it's the key to why the decisions made during the war were made in the first place.

>Privyet, kek dala. Am sitting on ground. Is good.

>Nihilist and proud
Again, literally kill yourself

Jarhead.

>Or is the fact that time has erased any of the war crimes that the Allies possibly committed?

Well people still talk about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Dresden was most definitely a war crime.

In the movies though I think a major difference is that the Americans are fighting an enemy that can actually competently fight back

>there once was a nip who swallowed a fly...

The ideology and morality is mostly about convincing farmers to turn their plowshares into swords.

It's easier to get people to fight and die when they're convinced they are the good guys.

I'm not saying the leaders don't buy into it, too. Just that ultimately, war is always about controlling territory and resources.

>but war is only about resources and territory.

Hitler was very open and honest about that though. lebensraum my man

No, my point was I was picking on that as something 'morally wrong' when morality doesn't exist.

Upham was a complete coward though. He let the guy who killed his comrade just walk off and then he shoots a completely different man after he has already surrendered.

He's quite literally the biggest cunt in the film

Here's what went down.

>Japanese government decides to mess around in northeastern China (standard imperialist influence type stuff, investment, unequal treaties with the Chinese, etc.)
>Japanese mid-level officers essentially go rogue and organize a false flag attack in Manchuria (with the implicit approval of certain members of their government)
>things sort of spiral out of control from there, Japan is back at war with China
>army and navy basically acting independent;y of the civilian government at this point, doing whatever they please, the heads of the military and the Minister of War have more power than the Prime Minister
>national policy changes entirely as a result
>Japan starts getting bogged down in China
>The US, under pressure from its own citizens (horrified by Japanese atrocities) and the "China lobby" (Congressmen from areas that relied on trade/investment with China), cuts off oil and rubber sales to Japan
>Japan is now running out of oil and rubber

Any reasonable civilian government would have said "ok, time to cut a deal with the Chinese and withdraw". But the Japs were completely at the whims of their own military at this point. And the military's solution to everything is more war. Plus the navy was angry that the army was getting all the glory and funding. So that's how we got Pearl Harbor. Utter madness, would make for one hell of a movie.

I thought America basically forced Japan's hand, because without the oil they wouldn't be able to fight period, so they either had to give up and go home (they probably assumed that China would come after them or something), or find another source of oil, the only viable one being the reserves held by Shell in SE Asia, which would have prompted a response by the US navy if they tried to take it.

From there they devised their plan to annihilate the pacific fleet at pearl harbor, which would buy them enough time to secure their alternate source of oil which would allow them to push their advantage to establish control in the Pacific before America could recover. tldr they were pot committed.

Nice summary

Yes and no. He was very open about his plan for lebensraum, but he got the population fired up for a very large and costly military campaign by appealing to resentment over the first Treaty of Versailles and convincing Germans it was their righteous destiny to march across Europe and North Africa.

He then paid for said campaign by promising German workers kraftderchfreudewagens and seaside holidays and taking all the money they paid in to build tanks and airplanes since the first treaty forbid using state money for building military assets.

>Leaders of organized military suddenly have more power than official rulers of the country

Where have we heard this one before?

America did force Japan's hand, but only if you're taking the position that Japan stopping its war in China was impossible. Japan could have easily offered the KMT a chance to surrender conditionally (giving up large parts of Northeastern China, which was what the Japanese were originally after anyway), taken most of what they wanted, and they would have walked away stronger than ever before.

>they probably assumed that China would come after them or something

The Chinese were completely broken as a nation, their factories were destroyed, their people were starving, and there was a bloody civil war going on. It would have taken decades for them to come after Japan, and with most of their most valuable industrial land in Japanese hands it might have never happened at all.

And FWIW, Hitler probably honestly believed it was Germany's righteous destiny to march across Europe and North Africa, but the industry of warfare doesn't see righteousness. It sees resources and money, and once you start fighting a big war you need those resources and money to keep flowing in.

If Adolf had stopped at Poland, WWII probably would just been a local brushfire. But once that machine starts rolling, it doesn't want to stop.

Look at how much of the US economy depends on "defense spending" now.

More importantly, Germany was desperately short on reserves of hard currency. The state was essentially bankrupt, which is part of the reason why the first thing Hitler did after taking over Czechoslovakia and Austria was seize all the gold reserves. There's a very convincing theory out there that the invasion of Poland was as much about keeping the Nazi state alive as it was about lebensraum.


>Look at how much of the US economy depends on "defense spending" now.

Not even remotely comparable. The US spends just 3% of its GDP on the military today (compared to an all-time peak of 44% in 1945 and about 10% at the peak of the Cold War). The Germans were spending upwards of 50% in 1938, even before WWII. The entire economy was geared towards the military

Sources, because I know how annoying it is when people just pull numbers out of their asses. Also it was 44% for Germany, not 50%.

marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/04/the-economics-of-nazi-germany-part-ii.html

You can find the US numbers in about 5 seconds on google too.

Props for sources. To be pedantic I think 44% qualifies as "upwards of 50%"

(and I do like to be pedantic)

But yeah, when it comes to war ideology bends around economics.

George the First may have a domestic clusterfuck, but his Foreign policy was pretty on point.

Too bad the rest of the Republicans and half the Democrats didn't know enough to let sleeping dogs lie.

>Look at how much of the US economy depends on "defense spending" now.


yeah, less than 5% of it......

That was more of a heist movie with a Gulf War setting.

I don't think China would be willing to enter a peace treaty with Japan, especially after the embargo. Japan simply didn't have the resources to effectively control China, I think it was sort of similar to the eastern front a the start of Barbarossa, Germany was steamrolling, but there was tonnes of resistance in their conquered countryside which led to atrocities, the difference was that Germany was moving to cut the head off at Russia and access the oil fields at Baku, while Japan had no hope of advancing to Chongqing, and as far as I know there weren't any sufficiently developed oil resources for them to take in China (hence their need to invade SE Asia).

They wouldn't be able to win a war of attrition and China knew that, so I doubt China would be willing to cede any land in any sort of negotiation. If anything I believe that after the embargo China knew that time was on their side, and it was up to Japan to go for the throat if they wanted any chance of not losing.

they weren't even Germans, they were Pollacks that were forced into combat, which makes it even worse

The Chinese knew that all they had to do was dig in and wait the Japanese out, it's a strategy that has worked well for them.

OK, the US was a college freshman example. Maybe more the Romans, they got stuck in a feedback loop of needing a growing military to expand their resources, and thusly needing more resources to fund their military.

Like I said, if the Germans hadn't gotten over ambitious the allies probably would have let them have Czechoslovakia and Poland.

They were all about appeasement until the war spread to Western Europe.

Iraq war isn't the same as the gulf war
best show about war ever made tbhfam but it's not a film

WWII actually changed the world

Iraq war was shit