There aren't very many films about the first Gulf War, which is ironic because if ever there was a war for PR purposes, that was it.  While Jarhead and Three Kings were rejected by the Pentagon's Hollywood office, one film that did benefit from military support was The Heroes of ...
Read more

As prep for my forthcoming video on Amazon's Jack Ryan as next-gen propaganda I've been keeping an eye on promotions and events around the launch of season two in November.  The first episode was shown at New York Comic-Con a few days ago, and at a panel discussion the new ...
Read more

The epic war drama The Deer Hunter won five Oscars, despite the central conceit and metaphor of the film being inaccurate.  This conceit - that the Viet Cong forced American prisoners of war to play Russian Roulette - is the main reason the film was rejected for DOD support, along ...
Read more

The US military's attempts to duplicate action movie technology took another leap recently as the Guardian XO robotic exoskeleton was demonstrated at the recent Modern Day Marine expo.  The suit is an obvious knockoff of the power loader exosuit featured in Aliens over 30 years ago, and reports suggest that ...
Read more

One of the most common conspiracy theories you hear in this line of research is that the Pentagon and CIA fund Hollywood movies.  This isn't entirely untrue - the CIA covertly funded productions of Animal Farm and 1984 in the early Cold War period - but on the whole, it ...
Read more

The role of the technical advisor is crucial to understanding the military-Hollywood relationship, but very few people know who these people are or what they do.  Even less well known is that a significant number of private industry technical advisors used to work for the Pentagon's entertainment liaison offices, and ...
Read more

The US Navy SEALs are known as the ‘quiet professionals’, but in recent times they have become the highest-profile of all US special forces. In this episode I examine several films depicting the SEALs, how the Pentagon has shaped their public image through Hollywood, and why they have become so ...
Read more

Captain Phillips tells the story of the 2009 hijacking of the Maersk Alabama - a US container ship - off the coast of Somalia, and the subsequent US Navy intervention that killed three of the pirates and arrested the fourth.  It is also one of the least historically accurate films ...
Read more

Walt Disney World Resort’s Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge opens this week - 14 acres of Star Wars experience for those who want to waste their money on plastic replicas of pod racers, Jar Jar Binks masks and hair dye so they can look like Vice Admiral Gender Studies from The ...
Read more

Lone Survivor is a piece of absolute militaristic schlock, starring the whiny-voiced Marky Mark Wahlberg as Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell - the only survivor of Operation Red Wings, a 2005 special forces joint operation in the summer of 2005.  Over 100 pages of Navy documents show their heavy involvement in ...
Read more

GI Jane is a crude, clumsy attempt to show a 'woman's perspective' on being in the military, that ruined Demi Moore's career as a leading lady.  Little known until now is how the Pentagon negotiated with Ridley Scott to rewrite the script, and even though the film didn't qualify for ...
Read more

One issue that comes up repeatedly in the script changes enforced by the Pentagon is war crimes, and other violations of the Geneva Conventions.  As is so often the case I'm left thinking 'if only the DOD applied the same rules to real life wars as they do to the ...
Read more