![]() Jean Baudrillard’s Desert of the Unreal is made manifest in Kuwait’s burning oil fields because the real footage here is indeed more strange and more difficult to believe than any of the fiction.Īnd perhaps this is exactly the point. In fact, the real footage is more surreal than any of the fiction. Missiles and rockets fly through the air looking like laser beams and space invaders thanks to the grainy 1991 VHS footage blown up to fit a movie screen. ![]() From the characterization and motivations of the protagonist through to the inevitable ironic justice of the ending, nearly every detail of this movie is based first and foremost upon what would look cool and never on what would be most accurate.Īnd while this is typical of biopics, The Devil’s Double complicates matters by framing the film on all sides with documentary footage of the first Gulf War. Latif even wrote a book on the subject, but Tamahari makes no bones about the validity of the film it’s fiction. ![]() This is a true story in the sense that Saddam did have a son named Uday and Uday did have a body double named Latif. The film tells the story of Latif, an Iraqi Soldier with Kurdish heritage who is forced to become a body double for Saddam Hussein’s emotionally unbalanced, cocaine-addicted and sexually deviant son Uday during the build up to the first Gulf War. Filmed independently on a reported $15 million budget, The Devil’s Double takes this new subgenre and pushes it into bizarre, gonzo and tremendously entertaining directions. Early traces of this can be seen in R-rated comic book adaptations including Wanted, The Punisher: War Zone and arguably Watchmen.Īll of this brings us to Lee Tamahori’s The Devil’s Double. After a decade of the closeted, whitewashed fascism of superheroes, filmmakers are beginning to feel comfortable positioning antiheroes as protagonists without any shades of grey. These films play as straight action fare with unambiguous morality but feature immoral, or more likely amoral characters at their center. If Post-9/11 filmmaking was defined by bringing moral simplicity to an increasingly complex world in order to reassure a traumatized populace, Post-Post-9/11 filmmaking appears to be developing around bringing amoral characters to the forefront to combat the more complex world and restore the original status quo, by any means necessary. Act and the War on Terror are central to the plot, but treated as little more than a simple McGuffin and an expositional shortcut. In both of these cases, The P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Meanwhile, From Paris, with Love, made by the same French filmmaking team behind Taken, deals with the anti-Arab xenophobia head-on, from the perspective of a paranoid bigot. ![]() The A-Team begins with an extended sequence set within the drug cartel sponsored civil war in Mexico, but it plays this as a gimmick with all the subtly and nuance of a James Bond intro. Hollywood filmmakers are now taking bits and pieces of the Post-9/11 landscape and adapting them into fantasy filmmaking. Traces of this new style can be found in films like Takenand Iron Man but solidified in 2010 with the one-two punch of From Paris, With Loveand The A-Team. We are now beginning to see a new movement, a sort of Post-Post-9/11 action film. And though many of the films were ultimately philosophically problematic, there was a general air of seriousness and importance to the proceedings.īut with the passage of time, the reverence has fallen away and films have begun to revert back toward a more streamlined approach. Terrorism played an increasingly central role in many films, but it was rarely treated as a simple Deus Ex Machina. Often, these films would feature lip service to anti-Arab sentiments by including at least one darker skinned cast member acting as a red herring ( Source Code). For most of this century’s first decade Hollywood thrillers reeled from the events of 9/11 by replacing stock Arab villains with other standbys like Nazis ( The Sum of All Fears), Soviet sleeper cells ( Salt), and corrupt figures within the US government ( The Manchurian Candidate ).
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