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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

When using military elements to tell your story...

Shawn Booth

Shawn Booth

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Please.

Please do your research. Find yourself a veteran or reservist or even an active duty trooper if you live in a military town. It really sucks watching "actors" play soldier, especially when they do it so poorly.

You may argue about the merits of doing research or getting it right. I can understand the multitude of excuses why one can't get real soldiers to "help out" or "why does it really matter?" It matters because we veterans can see it, are removed from the story and your flick losses credibility... It also pisses us off. Please show respect to those who did, and do, what you aren't willing to, or couldn't, do.

Or better yet, tell a story you know something about and stay away from the military.

There's so much garbage out there showing fake troopers being idiots and yelling out horrible commands the writer strung together based off other horrible war movies/video games... If you don't know the military, hire someone who does or just do something else...
 
Agreed Shawn.

I was a military advisor on American Airlines' recent "Thank You" commercial campaign and have friends that have advised on features, a main problem most have run unto is that A. The actor wants to do something their way, or B. doing something properly, the wear of the beret for instance in almost all recent films, is just one example of something they don't want to spend an additional second getting right, so they look like a bunch of muppet chefs. Dialog is a whole different animal of course ;). It's definitely very easy to spot when someone has hired a good advisor for military aspects.
 
Shawn Booth said:
Please.

Please do your research.
Click to expand...
I think this applies to everything in the movies. If you are an AirLine Pilot you realize AirLine Pilots are not portrayed accurately. If you are a Doctor you realize Doctors are not portrayed accurately. If you are a Police Officer you realize .... etc. etc. There are more bad films than real masterpieces. Shoddy workmanship is evident everywhere. Quality costs money. I am DP on a film right now where the number one overriding concern above all else is to have production finished by May 01. All else comes second. If I say, "We must reshoot, there was a reflection in the window", the response is ... "No one will notice". People lie to themselves, they would rather believe "No one will notice", than to say, "We don't have the time to do it any better". And what is depressing is that we have some really fine Actors.
 
Agreed Shawn. After two deployments to Afghanistan I cannot watch or finish a movie that protrays soldiers in a manner not consistent with reality.
 
Shawn Booth said:
If you don't know the military, hire someone who does or just do something else...
Click to expand...

You could say the same thing about any movie or show about any specialized field (medicine, law enforcement, psychiatry, etc.). I remember my girlfriend's dad hating "Armageddon" because he was a geologist for an oil company. I think we might just have to accept that in some cases, the experts are not going to enjoy the movie. Otherwise the majority of movies would be about screenwriters in coffee shops.

Shawn Booth said:
It also pisses us off. Please show respect to those who did, and do, what you aren't willing to, or couldn't, do.
Click to expand...

Be nice, Shawn. Last I heard, we have a volunteer military service that pays people to do what they do. :patriot:
 
Isn't the main problem that for most movies, there's a very narrow path for the script writer to follow when making the characters? The audience for most big movies isn't really interested in what people are like; there are a few stereotypes that can be used, and the heroic ones mostly have to be cool; or else the investors are going to complain. Ofcourse you could add some reality to commands and procedures, but true professionalism is not cool to the bigger audience, unless we're talking documentaries.
 
If we're going to complain about that, let me add a vote to stupid computer programmer dialogue with his hands mashing the keyboard every second with obvious useless commands (and yes, this might make it "look" like he's doing something but mostly it just looks incredibly stupid and just wrong). Military dialogue is far too often cringe inducing and disconnected from reality...

Bottom line: producers and writers... do your homework!
 
George Butterfield said:
I think this applies to everything in the movies. If you are an AirLine Pilot you realize AirLine Pilots are not portrayed accurately. If you are a Doctor you realize Doctors are not portrayed accurately. If you are a Police Officer you realize .... etc. etc.
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True. Computer programming and hacking is one of the worst things - it totally kills a lot of movies for me. That was one of the (many) things that The Social Network did very right though - it was really great to hear "I'll just fire up emacs and write a simple perl script" and stuff about MySQL servers, and all that used correctly in the film.

TRON: Legacy was good also. The computer interfaces were futuristic but they still correctly used UNIX commands like 'ps' 'kill -9', 'grep' and so on. So it goes for anything - get someone who knows about the subject if you want to write a movie about it or you end up alienating the portion of your audience who really know a lot about the subject!
 
I've seen more of a trend in inaccurate military jargon and uniforms in more lower budget stuff than anything else. (I was in the marine corps for 6 years) so yeah I can see it IS a personal pet peeve of mine to see how slapped together it can be sometimes. Actors spend so much time and energy researching their role if they have to carry the torch from a previous actor that did the role, of if it's based off a historical character, or if it's from a book, and production, and the actor not taking the time to get how military personal would actually act and the thing they'd saying in that situation is beyond me. Best ones I've seen to date so far that I was able to relate to the most was "Generation Kill" HBO's mini series.

When they do it right, it's even more engrossing for a veteran, or current active member. You feel like you are there again. It's an important aspect of telling the story if military is your #1 story telling component.
 
Pietro Impagliazzo said:
Hello guys... Why don't you list, let's say, 3 BAD movies depicting military, and 3 GOOD ones?

Just for the sake of example.
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Well two good ones that come to mind are "Band of Brothers" and "We Were Soldiers", two real stories that were researched well and had good direction, i.e. Stephen Ambrose, COL Hal Moore.
 
Sometimes accuracy is boring.

Movies get computer programming, military stuff and medicine wrong so often (number of people that do CPR on film properly is close to zero). Research is important for any part of a film.
 
Yeah, absurd computer lingo really drives me nuts, as does the typical "hacker dude sits down at a password-protected computer and get in with three seconds of key-mashing scene".

Also, explaining away impossible phenomena by throwing out random physics jargon.
 
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