Netflix bills it as a dark comedy. Brad Pitt at times is hilarious doing a not too disguised depicture of a recent US commander in our Afghan War. Well worth a view.
It's generally been getting mediocre ratings from viewers. I enjoyed it for what it was. I thought Brad Pitt did a good job. I think it touched on some real truths about what we were trying to do over there with nation building. And, that whole nation building thing is a big joke because none of it ever materialized. It continues to be basically a culture clash with trying to sell them peace and prosperity through security first. The issues are we never secured anything except when we temporarily occupied those positions and trying to build a democratic and economic environment over there, i.e. nation building, is not going to happen because it is nothing like America or the West. These are poor, mostly uneducated people bound in their own culture living in small villages and tribes who see violent people with guns come and go. Some take up arms to defend themselves and some are just at the mercy of others. The movie does a good job depicting just how fruitless the whole endeavor is. These sad truths add up to a dark comedy. But, obviously, the play here was a satire primarily focused on General McMahon. I guess our mission over there has changed dramatically since the nation building pipe dream. Now, it's just a reduced footprint trying to get their Afghan forces built up to where they can fend for themselves. If they can achieve success with those forces and obtain security, then the nation building we were trying to force on them will come from within. But, given this is just a cross border Taliban war with remnants of Al Qaeda and ISIS mixed in, it just seems like a quagmire with no end in sight. And, it won't come as a complete shock when the US completely throws in the towel and abandons them yet again. All this hoping for a peace agreement between the Afghans and Taliban so we can have a proper exit is a pipe dream that is about as possible as efforts to eradicate the poppy fields from the Afghans agricultural footprint. We've heard a lot about how we abandoned the Afghans after the Russians were driven from Afghanistan. But, I have to wonder whether any of that would have made a real difference if we stayed engaged. Just because you throw money at a problem doesn't solve anything. Could we have established a secure and democratic country even back then? It just seems like they would have turned their guns on us because we would then be seen as the occupiers propping up a puppet government. It just doesn't mesh with Islam especially with the West trying to force it. Maybe the best move would have been to do nothing at all back then? But, everything back then was fixated on stopping the spread of Communism that it just didn't seem possible to not be involved. Governments are going to do what they are going to do. What the Russians did by invading was wrong. But, couldn't it be seen as wrong knowing what we know now in arming the Taliban with shoulder-fired missiles to turn the tide of war? At the time, that was a great victory for us. We beat back Communism and then we set up terrorism that led to 9/11 and where we are now. It just goes to show that there is no right and wrong when it comes to war much of the time. It just starts for some reason and it sets up future consequences that can be foreseen or unforeseen. But, this is the world...one big clusterf**k. Everybody's right and everybody's wrong.
Way too much voice over narration. After 20 minutes of it, and I saw the movie was 2 hours long. Couldn't do it.
It was just a cameo. _____ War Machine is a 2017 American satirical war film directed and written by David Michôd based on the nonfiction book The Operators by Michael Hastings. It is a fictionalized version of the events in the book based on the firing of United States Army General Stanley McChrystal.[2] The film stars Brad Pitt, Anthony Michael Hall, Anthony Hayes, Topher Grace, Will Poulter, Tilda Swinton and Ben Kingsley. It was released on Netflix.com on May 26, 2017.[3] Russell Crowe[20] as General Bob White (uncredited), a US Army officer similar to David Petraeus.
I gave it a "thumbs down." It wasn't a terrible movie, but there are much better war movies on Netflix than this one. I found Sand Castle to be an exponentially better film.
