Modern Armour Movies/Documentaries

[SeanPatrick]

This all reminds me of going to see any military movie with my father. He was always pointing out stuff like "That patch should be on his left sleeve, not his right."

Being a retired Lt. Col., to him it was a distraction. I, on the other hand, would've never noticed such a thing had he not pointed it out. I think most military film makers are thinking about the broader, non-military market when they make the decisions they do.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying it doesn't matter. I like seeing a movie and thinking that it was as close to actual combat as possible. (I recently saw "Act of Valor" and even though the main characters were all active duty SEALs I could still tell the director took some liberties.) But I think the same rule applies here as it does to Steel Beasts. Sure, eSim could implement tank maintenance to make the sim more realistic, but that aspect of a tanker's job is rather...well boring. (Except to weirdos like me.)

In the same way I think audiences would be bored seeing the crew spot an enemy and then have to wait 5 minutes for authorization to engage to come down the line. Just sayin'.

[Captain_Colossus]

Correct. It's no different than films about law enforcement, or medical doctors or lawyers or about professional sports. The years of esoteric experience and knowledge will never translate into a couple hours of celluloid- film itself is a simulation or representation of reality, it will never itself be reality. There's no way they can show everything and still get a message across, they will presume take liberty with some things and cut back on others.

There's even a problem with attempting to make a film so realistic, it doesn't make sense- if characters are speaking and acting such a way like real depictions, for example, preforming PMI maintenance schedules, the lay audience wouldn't necessarily know what's happening, or why- unless the film explained it through dialogue as to what's happening, but that wouldn't necessarily make a lot of sense from the point of view of realism. In real life, people doing this for a living wouldn't necessarily entertain dialogue like that, they already know how to perform the task and wouldn't be explaining it as if there were some audience listening that didn't understand what they were doing. That could just appear very contrived and appear to be 'breaking the fourth wall.'

Once in that situation, they wouldn't be explaining chain of command and proper orders to each other, you reach that point presumably because you already know all that, and you wouldn't be explaining that to each other in combat. So, films are going to condense, collapse truncate or represent that knowledge in a way that might make sense to an audience- and again, it could be a film about Wall Street executives or people who look for sunken treasure, a film would do the same thing in every case, and experts would weigh in on their own particular area about what's inaccurate or whatnot.

[DarkAngel]

What concerns me looking at the IMDB of "Thunder Run" is that there is already a woman listed. This makes me think that it will contain some "Pearl Harbor" style love story.

[Gibsonm]

Or better yet that they will merge this with the US female PW extraction story.

[Ssnake]

Films are made to make a profit. If having some sort of a love story is the price to pay to convince some studio execs to whip out the checkbook, it may be an acceptable price to pay to get a movie done at all ... and the world can always use another movie with and about tanks.

Of course there is a fine (though somewhat subjective) line between "acceptable" and "contrived". I say, give 'em some slack - for sometimes they just don't know what they are doing. Generally movies are accepted more as an art form than they were in the 1960s, and some producers made some real butcher jobs out of some films that definitely had potential. It doesn't seem to be that brutal anymore, these days - maybe also thanks to DVD releases where the director has a chance to present a movie in the way it should have been, were it not for runtime demands from the actual cinemas (so they can fill a hall five times a day and not just four).

[12Alfa]

My fear is the M1 lovers here on the forum. They are already delusional:eek2: to a point that if their beloved M1 should be KIA they go off the deep end:decu:. A film about the M1 is not going to help with their therapy, and we will have to live with them here.

I guess I can always mute them out.... heheheh:diable:

Sry RS...

JK'ing:remybussi: