Act of Valor

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3525872&pagenumber=63&perpage=40#post411496993

On this note, Act of Valor is some next-level shit. It's a fascist film far superior to The Dark Knight Rises. It's pretty good!

Here's the trick: Act of Valor presents the terrorists as cool dudes, and the only characters with, well, characterization. The scene where the terrorist leader is shown the hi-tech suicide vests is deliberately modelled after the 'Q' scenes in 007 films. "You could hide this under a tuxedo." Act of valor is more successfully anti-Bond than most of these recent Craig films. It's primarily anti-cynicism.

A scene of a hostage rescue in the Costa Rican jungle is frequently intercut with 'insect vs. spider' imagery. Except it soon becomes clear that the navy seals constitute the web - the collection of weak threads that are strong when grouped together. (The fasces is literally referenced at one point.) So: what is the spider?

Here's the opening voiceover, presented as a letter written from a father to his son:

"Before my father died, he said the worst thing about growing old was that other men stopped seeing you as dangerous. I've always remembered that, how being dangerous was sacred, a badge of honor. You live your life by a code, an ethos. Every man does. It's your shoreline. It's what guides you home. And trust me, you're always trying to get home."

The way it's dropped right in there, it's a big dump of abstract information, and then you parse it: being perceived as dangerous creates the feeling of stability. That is what constitutes the titular 'acts of valor'. The film is about the act of storytelling.


http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3525872&pagenumber=65&perpage=40#post411505324


The opening scene of Act of Valor, after the voiceover'd prologue, shows the SEALs leaping from an aeroplane during a training exercise in San Diego. The cameraman pulls back and films the parachutists from above as they descend on a town of some sort. SMASH CUT to a street scene in the Phillipines. The camera glides precariously over the motorbikes. WHIP-PAN to a passing van and CUT to the interior, to show that it is being driven by a shifty terrorist.

Note that the scene of SEALs parachuting has absolutely no plot function. It's aesthetic. The SEALs travel in swift, synchronized motion, faces obscured and anonymous. They look downwards, with clear vision, onto the 'abstract' grid of houses. This grid view is then overlaid with simulated computer graphics with GPS coordinates. The smash cut carries their swift, forward motion into an entirely different scene, establishing that this is metaphorically what they will descend into. But, importantly, the POV is now moving independent of our supposed protagonists. The camera darts between cars and bikes, now fully 'disembodied' but subjective and unstable. This gliding motion is then violently interrupted by the terrorist, suddenly 'popping out of' the scene.

I think, earlier in this thread, that someone found it risible that one of the SEALs would get shot in the head and then suddenly regain consciousness, screaming obscenities, 15 minutes later. Really though, (beyond this being an actual Act of Valor (as they say in the commentary) (read: threatening story)) imagery of undeath is all over the film. Characters continually prepare for death, act as if they are dead already, or are literally half-dead - leading to the chilling scene where a torture victim is told 'it wasn't for nothing' by a SEAL showing her a crucial smartphone he retrieved during her rescue. In other words: the mutilation of your body was 'worth' the preservation of this data. Even the scenes of the heroes lovably interacting with their families are inappropriately superimposed with those onscreen graphics taken from Quantum of Solace (though far less obnoxiously overdesigned). In Quantum, this data is manipulated 'from above' by godlike experts. Here, the 'M' figure is simply a woman in a headset reading what she's shown. Everyone is subordinate to, and devoted to the maintenance of, the network of intelligence and information-gathering.

The villains of the film are differentiated from the heroes by way of their self-centeredness. "Die for us," they say, as opposed to the SEALS' "we will die for you". Implicitly, then, the terrorists and druglords stand in for the American government, conspicuously absent from the film, who are themselves ordering the SEALS to die for 'the cause' from afar. Paired sequences late in the film directly equate an American soldier to a suicide bomber. This is entirely in keeping with how the film destabilizes the protagonist/antagonist dynamic. The 'jihadist' is simultaneously a James Bond and Blofeld figure. The SEAL protagonists are both noble heroes and the faceless SWAT ciphers from a Chris Nolan film. I'm liking this one a lot.


http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3525872&pagenumber=93&perpage=40#post411767416

First of all, watch it. Yes, it is propaganda - but no more so than a given Marvel Studios production. I actually find it less objectionable because it is both upfront about its funding and so genuinely well-made that it has the nuance and subversive qualities of a John Milius or Michael Bay film (I'd actually place it somewhere between those two, aesthetically).

But as I said, it's basically a remake of Plan 9, touching on most of the same themes and plot points. It's just presented through the lens of millennial war films instead of 50's scifi, and told from the perspective of the 'humans'.

As in Plan 9, the narrative centers around a flawed, egoistic terrorist/artist/alien and his determination to succeed in spite of cuts to his already too-small budget and the general ignorance and indifference of the public he's trying to sway. On the other side are a group of blank ideologues, ostensibly the protagonists, defined more by their uniforms than anything else. Neither side is presented as terribly sympathetic thanks to this dynamic of banal, stupid good guys fighting an unapologetically evil underdog.

The shift in perspective and aesthetic from low to high budget allows the film to operate as a companion piece rather than a retread. It's 'politically incorrect' in a valuable way, refusing to go the tolerant, liberal Avatar route. It doesn't present terrorists as a bunch of sad poors who happened to stumble across some bombs. And a lot of the good qualities it finds in The Troops are sincerely good, though they are ultimately fighting to maintain the status quo of their (conspicuously offscreen, mostly unmentioned) superiors.

Sequences blurring fiction and documentary footage, though seamlessly integrated, play a role roughly analogous to Plan 9's stock footage. There's an essay to be written here.

But it's overall just a well-made, challenging film. Parts of it genuinely evoke Michael Mann, Kathryn Bigelow and even Terrence Malick. No joke.


http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3525872&pagenumber=183&perpage=40#post412454852

That's the feel of VALOR. Clearly you're not used to it!

But for real though, I thought the film was remarkably even-handed - along the lines of Red Dawn. It's no more 'propagandic' than Battleship or Iron Man, which likewise featured the involvement and support of the US military.

Iron Man is actually far worse for being a kid-movie pean to liberalism with one-dimensional terrorists and a token 'good Arab'.

Act of Valor is R-Rated, obviously political film with a nuanced presentation of both sides - arguably presenting them as 'both worse'. They overtly put the head terrorist in a Darth Vader role, not unaware that Darth was a uniquely powerful and somewhat sympathetic character in an uncomfortable alliance with the Empire. Darth Vader took being 'evil' extremely seriously - as an ethical commitment.

One thing that Batman 3 got right was in making Bane a similar Darth Vader figure, until reduced to a 'mere human'. Act of Valor does the same thing in making the terrorist a weirdly sympathetic figure who, contrary to what you'd expect, fails because he doesn't go far enough - succumbing to cowardice, megalomania and other human failings.

The good guys, on the other hand, are merely drones, filling the same role as the aliens from Aliens or Battle: Los Angeles. The film has no Ripley or Sgt. Nantz figure - unless you count the terrorist, who fails to be their equal.

It's in a conversation with these other films, and frankly up there with them,