Did the world really need another Rambo movie?
Apparently the answer is yes. The world needed the real Rambo movie - a movie so graphic and so violent, it could never be filmed before. Hooray for Hollywood! After 25 years of waiting, in 2008 we get to see what it looks like to shoot a human body with a high-calliber machine gun. Awesome!!
I first hear about this movie last year and how it was going to set new levels of violent realism. This has me wondering: do we need more graphic violence in movies?
Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers set a new standard for the level of realistic violence in war movies. Gone was the John Wayne glory-talk; in was the meat. Video games are also setting new levels of depicting violence and "gibs".
My assumption is that Spielberg was trying to give the rest of us a better idea what it must have been like to be in a war. Their efforts were about recognition of the soldiers who served and education for the rest of us.
The take-way: war is horrific. Terrible things are done. People die. War is a bad thing that ought to be avoided at all costs not rushed into. Rushing into a conflict, Iraq for instance, will have a terrible price to be paid in human lives and misery.
I think those are good lessons to teach but I really question whether those are the lessons people are learning.
I fear that we are just reaching new levels of violence as entertainment. There is no moral lesson from movies like Hostel or Saw. And we human beings are visual, learning-machines. What we see becomes a part of us. Are these visions enriching our understanding of life or are they having some other effect, like desensitizing us?
As far as I can tell, war has not slowed down, nor has genocide, car bombs, or school shootings. We seem to be more entertained but not any less violent or cruel to other human beings.
