Brief Movie Review: The Messenger

This is a deeply affecting film that shows off the acting chops of Woody Harrelson to great effect. He doesn’t seem at all out of place alongside the female Daniel Day Lewis (meaning best film actor in the world), Samantha Morton.

It strikes me that the three finest films I have seen about the War That They Say Is Against Terror focus on the toil of being a solider: Stop-Loss, The Hurt Locker and this. This might lead us to consider many things. Firstly the attempt to render soldiers admirable can no longer take the form of untrammelled glorification like in the old days. But then shit like Act of Valor still exists so we have to qualify that claim. Secondly, there is a natural desire to make sense of the waste that the wars have been by empathising with the warriors. These movies that focus on the tragedy of the combatants (on our side) might be a form of penance for sending them out there in the first place.

But mostly I am struck by how the enemy is pretty much nowhere to be found. Because we don’t know our enemy.

I don’t mean that in a “They’re hiding in the shadows” sort of way. I mean it in the sense that these wars are perhaps most wrong for the way we have fought them, remotely and at a distance. We claim to build nations, but we just destroy targets. We can’t make a film about the people we kill because we can’t even find out where they might have been killed since battles are no longer matters of public concern, hidden by official secrets acts and obfuscated behind national security concerns.

I’m out on a limb here so let me retract this in the future. But as fine as they are, these films might well condemn us doubly for their narcissism.

Your Correspondent, Remembers that war doesn’t determine who is right, only who is left.