War Movies Face an Uphill Battle in a Changing Hollywood

“Survival is not all it’s cracked up to be,” declares Captain John Castle, played by Scott Eastwood, in Rod Lurie’s absorbing new World War II film “Lucky Strike.” Tell that to the war movie genre. Once a cherished Hollywood staple that attracted all-star casts, mainstream audience appeal, and critical acclaim — think back to “The Dirty Dozen,” “The Great Escape,” and “Platoon” — lately, the genre has been in the trenches.No picture made this decade features in the Top 100 most commercially successful war films, as compiled by Box Office Mojo. While a war movie, in the form of “Wings,” was the first film to ever win a Best Picture Oscar in 1929, just one film in the 21st Century has landed that Academy Award: Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker,” in 2010.So tin hats off to director Rod Lurie and actor Scott Eastwood — son of Clint Eastwood — for fighting a reargard action for the genre. The pair first collaborated on “The Outpost,” Mr. Lurie’s acclaimed 2020 drama depicting the Battle of Kamdesh in October 2009, one of the bloodiest battles America fought in the Afghanistan war. Mr. Lurie is notorious for being one of Hollywood’s unluckiest directors when it comes to the release of his films: 2001’s “The Last Castle,” starring Robert Redford, had to be re-shot after the 9/11 terror attacks; 2008’s sorely underrated political thriller “Nothing But the Truth” was derailed by its distributor going bust shortly before its release; and “The Outpost” premiered at the SXSW Festival in Austin in March 2020. You need no reminder what happened shortly afterwards…However, “The Outpost,” based on a 2012 book by CNN’s Jake Tapper, and starring Mr. Eastwood, Orlando Bloom, and Will Attenborough, proved a smash hit on VOD (video on demand), spending several weeks as the No. 1 film on iTunes. At a time when war movies seem to have low transmissibility in Hollywood, Mr. Lurie — an Israeli-American graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point — has caught the war movie bug.“Lucky Strike,” a cat-and-mouse thriller set in the final months of World War II, follows wounded Captain Castle, trapped behind enemy lines during the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium’s Ardennes forest, as he uses a radio, and the cigarette brand of the film’s title, to outwit the Germans.”This is a uniquely made movie,” Mr. Lurie said when I asked him about the origins of the film, which is in limited release. “The guy who gave me my big break in this business was the co-writer of this film, Marc Frydman. He’s from France and when he was 16 years old in 1974, his high school flew in American World War II veterans for the students to interview. One guy he interviewed told him a version of the story you see in ‘Lucky Strike.'”Colin Hanks and Scott Eastwood in ‘Lucky Strike.’ Roadside AttractionsUnlike “The Outpost,” whose intensity and rawness leads its director to say it “is not a movie that you would watch with popcorn,” Mr. Lurie says of his new film, “I wanted to make a movie that was very entertaining, in the spirit of ‘The Guns of Navarone,’ or ‘Where Eagles Dare.’ People can watch this war film with popcorn.”1968’s “Where Eagles Dare starred Scott Eastwood’s father Clint Eastwood, alongside Richard Burton. Mr. Eastwood also directed 2014’s runaway hit war movie “American Sniper,” in which Bradley Cooper played Chris Kyle, the late United States Navy SEAL sniper who served four tours in the Iraq War. When I interviewed him a decade ago, Scott Eastwood confessed, “I auditioned for ‘American Sniper’ and didn’t get a role.” But his father did cast him in his 2006 war film “Flags of our Fathers,” and he has also appeared in 2014 World War II movie “Fury,” alongside Brad Pitt, as well as “The Outpost.” Mr. Eastwood told the Boston Herald that when he was offered “Lucky Strike,” he initially felt he had made enough war movies but relented as it was a “cool survival story [and] a great examination of what war does to the human spirit.”Those war movies that do still get made are often set during World War II. “Pressure,” starring Brendan Fraser as President Eisenhower and dramatizing the build-up to the Normandy landings, was released last May. “As a former soldier myself, I think what World War II gives you is something that almost every other war since World War II cannot, which is an ability to be entertaining,” said Mr. Lurie. “With the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, or the Vietnam War, there is a certain nuance to our involvement in each. It’s very difficult to make a film about those wars that is not, at its heart, very serious and which has very specific messaging…the thing about World War II is that the division between the evil and the good is so clear. There’s simply no ambiguity. It’s America or Britain versus the Nazis. I can kill the Nazis one by one, and people will be entertained by that.”Some think the war movie tradition became damaged this century in the wake of several rows about historical truth being distorted onscreen in the name of heroism. “Hollywood movies fictionalize the truth but taking egregious historical liberties with a conflict of such significance as WWII matters more than standard cinematic deviations from reality,” wrote historian Lord (Andrew) Roberts in an article for the website Heat Street a decade ago. He added: “The Michael Bay movie ‘Pearl Harbor,’ starring Ben Affleck and Kate Beckinsale, was full of basic errors, the most absurd being the way the hero transfers from being a fighter pilot into a bomber pilot, and changes services between the USAAF and the RAF. The mistakes made in Brad Pitt’s truly historically dreadful film ‘Fury’ occupy endless pages in cyberspace. Both were too removed from any kind of reality for me to sit through them to the end.”The then-UK Prime Minister Tony Blair even condemned the 2000 Hollywood movie “U-571,” in Parliament. “U-571,” starring Matthew McConaughey, depicted Americans, rather than the Royal Navy, capturing the Enigma machine that allowed the German naval codes to be cracked.Matthew McConaughey in ‘U-571.’ Universal PicturesA screenwriter specializing in historical drama, Henry Fitzherbert, whose credits include the hit Netflix series “Wyatt Earp and the Cowboy War,” reckons Hollywood economics have not been kind to the genre. “War films are becoming increasingly expensive to film,” he said. “The war movie is director-driven — they think it can be meaningful and win them awards — but that means you now need a big-name filmmaker to get them off the ground. And the younger directors increasingly don’t seem as interested in that type of film or time period.”The war movie seems particularly dependent on changing tastes in Hollywood. Four decades ago, the likes of Stanley Kubrick with “Full Metal Jacket,” Oliver Stone with “Platoon,” Francis Ford Coppola with “Gardens of Stone,” and Brian De Palma with “Casualties of War,” all made Vietnam War films within a few years of each other, to varying degrees of success. Fast forward to now and war movies seem out of fashion among the cinematic cognoscenti. Recently the Museum of Moving Image in Queens held an extensive retrospective of films released in 2001. Conspicuously missing from their season was “Black Hawk Down,” Ridley Scott’s film released that year recounting the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, in which U.S. “Black Hawk” helicopters were shot down by Somali militia — even though Scott earned a Best Director Oscar nomination and Quentin Tarantino recently called it the best film of the 21st century.“I think one of the things that’s happening in the world is that there is a lack of love for anything that celebrates Americana, and especially jingoistic Americana,” said Mr. Lurie. “‘Black Hawk Down’ is about a spectacular military failure. It is also true that most war films start to become popular a few years after the war is over — it’s very difficult to make a war film while a war is ongoing or in the news.”Mr. Lurie is also finding it very difficult to make one of his passion projects, a film adaptation of Howard Blum’s 2002 book “The Brigade,” an account of five thousand Jewish volunteers being sent from Palestine by the British government to fight the Germans. “Winston Churchill allowed these Jews to put on the Star of David on the British uniform and they fought the Nazis in a singular battle,” Mr Lurie said. “It’s an extremely heroic story. I was commissioned to write it and then direct it for a major studio. They were gung-ho and then we had to sell it to a distributor. The Gaza war happens and you can kiss it goodbye.”Yet Mr. Lurie hopes to continue flying his flag for the genre. “I’d like to make another couple of military movies, maybe one at West Point,” he said. For now, ever the cinematic contrarian, Rod Lurie is filming his new picture in Calgary. It’s a movie starring Kiefer Sutherland and Barry Pepper, and one that falls within another endangered motion picture genre — the Western.

War Movies Face an Uphill Battle in a Changing Hollywood

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