The darkness does not fade

[serai]

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So I finally broke down and watched Black Hawk Down last night. Jesus fuck, what a depressing movie. I almost shut it off at the halfway mark. Between the unrelenting grimness and my developing queasiness at the very idea of trying to recreate something like this in the first place, it was too much, but I managed to finish it.

Remember that old song? War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing! This is the part of humanity that makes me glad we're heading down the hole, frankly - the entire constellation of violence, bloodshed, war, all of it. It's fucking obscene, but it's also the reason we're human and not something else. We can't get rid of it, so good fucking riddance to us, I say.

Fucking hell. That is it, I swear - no more fucking war movies for me. End. Finis. Done.
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Comments

[addie71.livejournal.com]

I don't usually watch war movies, but I watched this a long time ago. Major downer. :(

[serai1.livejournal.com]

I kept thinking "Why? Why would anyone make this film?" It's one thing for a story to be worth telling, but it's another thing entirely for it to be worth grabbing someone by the face and dragging them through the middle of it. One of the movie's themes seems to me to be the utter awfulness of this happening to anyone, so why would you want to force other people through it, even if it's only a limited simulacrum? What the fuck good does it do? It just seems like torture to me.

[lbilover.livejournal.com]

I've never seen it, but I recently watched Saving Private Ryan and felt much the same way. It was hard to sit through the entire thing. But it does make you understand the insanity of war.

[serai1.livejournal.com]

Yeah, SPR was similar, but for me it was really just that first section, the one about the Normandy landing, that messed me up. That was truly relentless. (I was particularly freaked out by seeing the bullets under the water. Somehow that had never occurred to me before.) But after that section, I wasn't as shattered by it, maybe because of the quest aspect, finding the guy. Gave the story a focus. But this? This is just back and forth, crisscrossing the same unnavigable landscape over and over, getting hideously picked off one by one, in a manner both bloody and savage. Sure, it's hell, but I don't want to go to hell, even in a fucking movie! LOL, it's just so awful.

[claudia603.livejournal.com]

I felt similarly over American Sniper. Although I can't compare to Black Hawk Down since I never saw that one. I usually avoid war movies like the plague...

[serai1.livejournal.com]

Don't. Just don't. You won't gain anything other than nightmares. It's bloody and awful. It started to feel like the gods were playing pinball with those poor bastards, just slamming them back and forth across the board, bouncing them off one deadly thing after another. ARGH.

[aliensouldream.livejournal.com]

I think film makers feel if they make enough horrible depictions of war it will help to stop wars. I wish that was the case.

Josh did say the experience of filming it made him evaluate his life at that time.

Was that your last Josh movie to see or have you more to go?

[serai1.livejournal.com]

I don't think there are any others. There are a couple that I tried to watch and just couldn't deal with. But I think I'm caught up so far. Fuck, this was so the wrong one to wind up on. ARGH.

So that was the one that kicked him back to Minnesota? Yeah, that doesn't surprise me. I'd imagine acting in it would kinda fuck a person up.

[mews1945.livejournal.com]

I've never seen that movie, much as I love Josh, because I know just enough about it to know it would break my heart. Life does that often enough without subjecting myself to it deliberately in a movie depicting something I can do nothing about. I stopped watching the news for the same reason. Sometimes I see news stories when I'm at my pulmonary rehab sessions, because they have the television set to the news channel, and I always get upset and have to recover my equilibrium somehow. You need to watch something like 40 Days and 40 Nights. It's so goofy and cheerfully ridiculous, it will give you a lift.

[serai1.livejournal.com]

Oh, I tried to watch that one, and it was so painfully bad that I couldn't get into it. It was on the order of Hollywood Homicide for me, but somehow even worse. I know Josh is cute in it, but... oy, I just can't.

I will say this - this fucking movie makes me want to go back and watch Cooties again. Hell, even Maniac would do to scrub the bits of this thing that are stuck to my brain. (Geez yeah, that's an apt image for the way I feel, actually - like somebody's brains got blown out inside my head, and now I have to clean all the blood and gunk off the walls of my head. ARGH)

Yeah, don't go near this one. Yes, it's technically amazing, but what's being depicted is so unrelentingly horrible, with absolute no redemption or anything to make it seem worth the trip. It's just a slog through hell, and then you get kicked out the door to go back to life, all fucked up by what you've seen. Yeah, thanks for that, guys.