Some of the film-making choices, such as the hospital material in Pearl Harbor, are different ways of showing the same event. But overall it’s a terrible film.

And add to that the time needed to make a film. It’s a much longer process these days.

Finally, while there may be something in production, I’d be surprised if anything were released before the Election. And getting the political overtones of the movie wrong could be a killer.

Even “Casablanca” had the luck of being released at the time of Operation Torch, so people had heard of the place.

And as far as I know, Hollywood didn’t make that film, Lumpy did.

People give old WWII movies a bad rap, but I see layers of complexity and good characterizations that aren’t found in a lot of entertainment today. Hell, my psuedonym’s character in Sands of Iwo Jima isn’t some two-dimensional joke. The guy was an alcoholic, a bad father, and a guy who had problems of his own, but he managed to carry-on and do his job anyway. I don’t think you’d see anything like that come out of a writer’s head today. They’d have to explore Stryker’s nuerosis’ and make him into some sort of tragic hero instead of a guy who was just trying to get by in the world and keep his guys alive at the same time. Or, they’d make him into a tortured soul who can barely deal with everything he sees. Either way, he would be a weak character if the movie were made today and the flick would probably suck.

As far as recent history goes, the only big movie to come out of the Gulf War was Three Kings, which was pretty good, but there had to have been more stories to tell than that.

The only other military movies of note have been SPR, Band of Brothers, and Kelly’s Heroes. They all dealt with WWII. Just about all of the Viet Nam movies have been Platoon remade over and over again, and from a pure film standpoint, Platoon was a so-so movie.