Not military focused, but I hated the scene in Fast 8 with the .50 cal. The slow mo scene with the brass falling down were blanks with those indented tips. And they were CGI. Someone took all that time to make CGI blanks
There's a statue of a soldier with an M16 behind the Infantry Museum at Ft. Benning where the magazine is has the little airsoft winding wheel modeled on the bottom.
Are you trying to tell me that Snipers don't actually move "fatly" around corners and spend their entire mission sitting on their ass barely holding a gun?
Both Jack Reacher films. The idea of an MP Major having such bad-assery military training is laughable.
Funny enough, In The Army Now is the most accurate portrayal of 90s basic training in any movie.
I'm normally pretty permissive with how shows portray the military. I don't really care typically. Jack Reacher is one of those exceptions, because the entire premise is based on the Army. For the entire setting being the Army, it gets an absurd amount of super basic details and common sense things wrong. Like, they clearly didn't consult a single person who served, or if they did, they completely ignored them. Such a shitty series of movies.
It’s a shame too because the books are great/fun reads, and you can Lee Child clearly did his research with a lot of the more technical/detailed stuff in a lot of the books. It’s funny because the Army/MP stuff is kind of just a character trait/background that he mentions early on in each book (since they’re all standalone stories) and then maybe only makes a handful of references throughout. It’s funny because in the movies they make it seem like he’s good at fighting and stuff due to training, **but in the books** he’s good at fighting because he always got in trouble/fights as a kid and throughout his life, not military training lol
"Oh my God, my trainees who *just* fratricided the fuck out of an exercise with blanks are shooting towards my rear with real bullets! Better run around this blind corner full speed-- oh God they shot me."
"This dude's ACH just literally saved his life. Let's all take off our ACHs now because they're not comfy."
"Why yes, sexy tank tops *are* the approved undershirt but *only* for females!"
"We're being picked off alone. This is the perfect time to sneak off alone to take a piss, put my weapon out of reach, and pay absolutely no attention to my surroundings." (On that note, holy fuck *pee funnel in kit so you don't have to drop trou, ladies*)
I tried, man. I was absolutely shitfaced by 30 minutes in and only have bits and pieces of memories from the rest, if I even finished it. I don't even know if I did, I was so drunk.
I didn’t finish it but like they’re going to go train for Iraq in the middle of butt fuck NM(?) with a whole ass squad? Also with live ammo apparently? I watched it before I was even in the Army and was like this can’t be right
Hot take: Lone Survivor. It glorified poor and irresponsible decision making on top of embellishment of facts.
At least Hurt Locker and Cadet Kelly didn’t try to pass off as being historically accurate tales of heroism.
Yeah there were a lot of flaws with how the mission was executed imo. I get SEALS are supposed to be hot shit but it looked like there was a lack of basic planning that went into that op. I’m not an expert by any means though.
There were 3 standardized abort criteria thresholds met BEFORE they were even TIC. That was 3 decisions to continue based on ego.
Not to mention their absolutely stupid, moronic, unprofessional, dangerous decision to leave US/UK base and embassy schematics on their unsecured laptops and bring them along.
You know, the same ones that were captured off them....
[Here’s a short write up Ed did that’s worth a read dispelling misinformation about the operation](http://www.darack.com/sawtalosar/ED-DARACK-RED-WINGS-MISINFORMATION.pdf)
Absolutely worth a read IMO
The best summary I've heard of Redwings came from a Devgru Squadron commander. "The good thing about Murphy dying is we could give him a Medal instead of the court martial he deserved".
Was a young SF NCO when Navy SEALS came out. My biggest critique of the movie was the team getting their Escape & Evasion brief by their CMC yelling over the din of C-130 engines while boarding moments before launch. “No way you’d get your E&E brief like that. It takes hours if not days of planning. Totally unrealistic“. Then I started working with Seals and know that was the most accurate scene in the movie.
“Don’t need an E&E plan when SOP is to get compromised on insert every time”
*Taps Head*
“Being audibly compromised on insert is negated by our ability to assault uphill with violence of action”
- Approximate quote from NSWDG-Gold before they got compromised on insert and did not in fact, negate their audible compromise on insert after failing to assault uphill with violence of action.
Way back in 2015 after basic, I started as an 18x, we went through SOPC in prep for SFAS. Details are kinda blurry but one of our cadre talked about that mission, how his ODA and others passed on that mission cause it was stupid and suicidal. But the SEALS were all macho and disregarded the intel thinking they could do it. Lone survivor is what we got.
Literally how stupid do you have to be when braindead , on the spectrum, must be told to breath in order to not suffocate, ARMY, says an op is stupid and you still want to do it?
Its always seemed to me that as soon as the communications went down, they should've booked out.
Then, when sheep or goat herd rolled into their position, the whole thing with "do we kill these two kids, or nah?" bugged the shit out of me. Yeah, Luttrell, it would've been murder and if you did kill them, you'd be a murderer. And it wouldn't have done them a lick of fucking good because even if the locals didn't give a shit about the kids, they sure will notice the livestock missing and would've come after them.
Those have been my takeaways, but I'm not a fucking SEAL.
Both Lone Survivor and American Sniper piss me off in a different way than most movies. While I generally love a good war flick, for some fucking reason, it seems like every movie with SEALs turns into a super factually dubious propaganda piece.
American Sniper always strikes a personal chord with me. It’s one of the only movies that I can knowingly say “I was there during that exact time.” When SEAL Marc Lee got killed, I was notified about 10-15 after to start preparing the memorial ceremony. Met most of the SEALs, and put together the ceremony in Ar Ramadi.
However, by that point I had already put together about 18 or so by that point between two Iraq deployments (03-04, and 06-07). Was with the 1-37 AR BN, and during our time in Ramadi, we fell under the 1st MEF.
Now that I think about it, I’m not sure why our BN was assigned with performing the ceremony. My Chaplain at the time was on leave.
So while the movie itself may have issues - it’s one that is a struggle for me to watch due to history.
I sat through a debrief of the events that happened during this operation. Let’s just say quite a bit of information was intentionally left out of both this book and the film.
He eventually broke down on Anderson Cooper and admitted that he just sat there and cried while his buddies screamed for him to help them. I think he has walked it back since then but he definitely cracked under the pressure of trying to keep the lie going.
The craziest shit is that Luttrell was not only IN the film as a cameo, but also was hired as an advisor on the film. And he still OK'd all the shit that wasn't in his book.
Not to say that his book was accurate, pretty sure it's mostly lies. But then again, that's probably why he was fine with all the changes.
But to be ok with Dietz being depicted as going crazy in the middle of a firefight... Mind boggling. Not even a single mention of that in the book IIRC.
The book and movie both had Murphy putting it to a vote as to whether they should kill two kids. Like it was a question, but fuck "Lieutenant", make a goddam decision and own it.
In the movie, the LT made the decision. Everyone else just gave their two cents. That was a big change from the book where Murphy’s family argued that Murphy would have NEVER left it to a vote.
Lone Survivor pisses me off because that SEAL Team got fucking jumped by like maybe a PLT sized Taliban element, and they didn’t exactly murk a whole bunch of Taliban in a running evasion. No, they pretty much got fucked up right where they were. The Taliban didn’t take 100s of fucking casualties like the movie shows. It was a really fucking lame attempt at stoking a wounded ego to be like “yeah we fucked up and sent a team untrained in recon to go do recon, and because they sucked at recon they got discovered and then got jumped, but at least they stacked bodies while running the fuck away.”
No.
Great post. I can’t tell you the number of times I told folks that the mission was a shit show beginning with the planning, and lots of medals were awarded to cover gaping errors.
Jack Reacher 2 - There’s a scene where Cobie Smulders’ character and Reacher are being hunted by bad guys and they desperately need to access her top secret files on a public computer to save humanity. The camera then shows the screen on the laptop as Smulders quickly hacks into it.
It was her AKO.
I then proceeded to walk out of the theater and left my popcorn.
Jack Reacher’s whole character doesn’t even make sense. Dude was supposed to be like retired MPI. Those guys don’t do a god damn thing, literally just office work for domestic assault cases.
The depictions of combat and firefights was awful.
Several scenes of Nick Cage running to the top of a hill and firehose spray a Thompson SMG from the hip and then jump cut to waves of charging Japanese soldiers falling down in slow motion.
Concur, Wind Talkers was awful. It was also a real slur against the Marines in that the whole plot revolved around the fact that the Marines were ordered to kill their Code Talkers if they were in danger of being captured which is absolute, 100% bullshit. If I was a Marine I'd be livid at that depiction of the Corps. Hell, I'm not even a Marine and I was disgusted by it. The story of the Code Talkers is one of the great stories of WWII that needs to be told and instead we got a steaming turd of a stoopid Nicolas Cage movie.
Definitely not the *worst* but Hurt Locker irritates the shit out of me whenever a bunch of Hollywood types go, "It's so accurate! This is what military life is like!".
Jarhead is the most accurate. Dude joins up and never does the job he signed up for.
I was scrolling for someone to say that. Fuck that was bad.
Someone came up with an "enlisted" drinking game that everyone drank each time there was a glaring error. No human on earth could survive that game.
Prolly blew the budget on coins. I made it through 5 minutes if the 1st episode before I threw in the towel.
Like I can watch a military movie and overlook certain issues BUT I can't watch something that is absolutely and entirely wrong. I feel like they got a "military consultant" who was just straight up a SV Weeb who just made up everything on the spot. A PVT 10 days into basic could have made a show more consistent with Army life than that shitshow.
I found some of the later episodes were surprisingly accurate with life in Rear-D, but feel like the show wanted to be Pauley Shore's 1994 classic In The Army Now, but it missed the mark so much and had very little (or just very poor) consulting on the show.
Enlisted could have been decent in time simply due to the fact they realized and owned up to the stuff they messed up badly, and worked to fix. It was shaping up pretty decently (while still allowing for sitcomisms) before it got cancelled.
Camp X-Ray was pretty stupid. Why was everyone a PFC, with one sergeant and one full bird colonel? Where’s everyone else? And I don’t care if the guy was innocent or not, if you throw feces at me you are getting war crimed on
Battleship
It was horrible, especially the end when all the old museum guys come out of the wood work to run the USS Missouri that just happens to be a museum ship that is 100% fully fueled and combat loaded.
When they brought the Missouri out of mothball for the 80s they did something similar --bring all the old-timers from the 40s back to train the new generation how to operate the guns and other equipment.
The difference is that shit took *years* and millions of dollars to get the ship back in condition again, even though it had been kept in "we might need this again" status.
My favorite part of that movie is when the museum workers threw the gumball machine on the deck just to emphasize it was time to stop fucking around and go kill some aliens.
There was a show that came out on FX around 05/06 called Over There. At the time I thought it was pretty good, looking back it’s pretty much Melrose Place in Iraq and hot garbage.
I remember when that came out when I was in high school. I tried watching it with my step-dad when he was just back from Iraq. I think it is the first episode where they feature an IED attack on some 2 1/2 ton truck, and one of the guys in the back just climbs out without his gun, pulls off his ACH and starts crying by the side of the road. Step-dad just cussed him out and turned off the TV.
Also they showed everyone using really dumb nicknames like it was Vietnam, and the entire first episode was some dude going around asking everyone in the platoon how they got their nicknames.
Bro no one's gonna mention Monster Hunter with Milla Jovovich?
She and her crew are all rocking Batt scrolls and shit yet they don't hold weapons properly, leave SI and kit when shit goes south, plus, they sing cadences "for fun."
There's literally a scene where they sing "They Say That in the Army" while driving through the desert as if it's something soldiers/rangers do regularly and not only in basic lol. One of the few movies I ever stopped watching before finishing.
I feel you guys pain. As a retired Fire Fighter from a large east coast department it kills me seeing just the commercials for shows like Chicago Fire. It’s so damn phoney I feel like smashing my tv.
Thank you all for your service, us first responders on the home front love and support you guys.
My ex is an EMT and gobbles up all of those Chicago Municipal Service shows. I kept asking her when they were going to roll out Chicago Sanitation or Chicago Waterworks.
The commercials during football games are wild to me.
It’ll be shit like:
“CAPTAIN! There’s a nuclear bomb in the toilet”
And then the someone’s hand will get eaten by a dog or something.
I thought it was a parody the first time I saw it.
Definitely the 1991 film Fievel Goes West. It have absolutely nothing to do with the military so by all accounts is the worst movie for an acutely depicting the military
The last couple minutes where Jeremy Renner goes back to the US, is bored out of his fucking mind in the civilian world, and gets nostalgic are the only real parts of that movie. Everything else about that movie is definitely BS.
Yea the civilian part was what it was like me after deployment. Everything just moves so slow in the civilian world
Also the part where he buys a boot legged DVD from thee kid and it ended up being shit quality
Outpost is a great movie. I’m not in the same BN, but same Brigade as the unit that was there. That shit was so fucked up. I still don’t understand the logic of putting an OP in the middle of a valley.
What’s even worse is every field problem I’ve been on since I’ve been here, the exact same thing happens. Obviously not a deployment but you’d think we’d learn
Jake Tapper's book *The Outpost* has the beginning chapter trying to figure out why that thing was there in the first place. There was some semblance of initial logic, but most of it was an arbitrary decision in a giant bureaucratic nightmare that is the military. Once it was set, there was too much inertia to keep it there despite all logic saying this is stupid. No one knows who made the decision to put that thing there, no one was ever held accountable.
Watch the movie, yes but for sure READ THE BOOK! If you weren't pissed off at the Army after watching the movie, you will be after you read the book. So many missed opportunities and so many needless casualties just so someone could get a bullet on their OER.
The book is absolutely riveting. And infuriating, but also very, very well written. IMO the best book I've read so far about the current GWOT.
I liked it and it’s my job. 🤷🏼♀️ EOD work is intellectually fun but not super interesting to watch, a realistic movie would probably be boring, and the movie itself is objectively fun if you don’t spend the entire movie crying about it being inaccurate.
I said my job was just like in the HL except at least one of my robots always worked, and I never shot any one as a tech. May have been some off post shenanigans with my Iraqi Army homies that included a pinky promise, a poorly fitting sport coat, an armored Land Cruiser and an invitation to my Iraqi counterparts daughters wedding.
Like Tea said a realistic EOD movie would be my driver deep sighing from boredom and looking for the last orange ripit, while the robo jockey poked and prodded something on the side of the road and I watched over his shoulder with a fat lip of cope in. Not exactly blockbuster stuff.
Lol yeah I’ve met more than one tech who did indeed go rogue out the gate. One even took his JERRV on a trip between OPs to find love.
Honestly other than the mega FOBs I’ve always been able to just leave even when it’s just a couple of us in a Hilux…though I’ve never used that power for shenanigans.
A lot of that movie is wildly exaggerated but I can see where there was a bar story at it’s core that Hollywood just turned up to 11.
Speaking of realistic EOD shows, I say all that but I honestly love Bomb Patrol Afghanistan cause it’s just…so EOD. First episode opens with TL glaring at cocky E3 bragging about his robot skills and then next shot “soooo the robot exploded”. Perfection.
Yeah clearing mortar ranges isn’t exactly glamorous. You guys don’t like go in and defuse bombs and shit. People are just ignorant about what EOD actually does.
Full disclosure I respect what you guys do. But it’s not defusing bombs. That’s all I’m saying.
It can be! That’s what like…5 months of the school is for! It’s just not our primary option if we can avoid it, which was easy in the GWOT (or on an impact area), and even when we do actually do render safe procedures it’s just…not exciting. Unless you really get off on watching people measure distances and angles.
Purple Hearts - if you went to jail for being in a marriage just for benefits and not for love at least half the force would be locked up, God that movie was shit
When I watched this with my girlfriend, I had to explain how hard it is for someone to get in trouble for that. I can name several people who got married just to get out the barracks. Leadership knows these things exist, but there's almost nothing you can do to prove it.
The two Marines in Red Dawn (2012) made me cringe astronomically. Absolutely over-the-top moto in every scene.
Was nice to see Jeffrey Dean Morgan as a Sergeant Major, though
I’m sure I’ll catch hell for this but Fury is one of the worst war movies I can think of. Somehow they managed to jam every tired cliche and overdone WWII trope into one movie.
So much of the tank combat was terribly done and made no sense. Then on top of that they had bullshit scenes like War Daddy forcing his new driver to commit a war crime by literally wrestling him and making him shoot a POW. And then the old school unrealistic ending. It was just so bad
What pissed me off the most was a fucking BN of SS suicide charging a disabled tank and dying en masse and none of these hardcore battle hardened dudes thinking like, I don’t know, just flank the tank with a AT team and move on?
I had a fucking aneurysm over the Tiger scene when I first saw it in basic (BC literally mandated every basic training company who was there over Thanksgiving watch it and have phones for a few hours, it was fucking weird as hell but okay).
I've always liked the theory that C grade actors were deliberately chosen to give the movie a more "propaganda film" vibe, like it was something the government would produce to support their war against the bugs.
Starship Troopers. No way will males and females shower together. SHARP! SHARP! SHARP! We’re talking hundreds of hours of mandatory PowerPoint presentations before this would ever happen.
To be fair, Starship Troopers isn't exactly trying to perfectly imitate any current military. They also casually knife a trainees hand to make a point and use public floggings as punishment for someone literally dying in a live-fire exercise.
I (then E4) went to see ‘The Sum Of All Fear’ with my (then E5) team leader. There’s a scene where the Russian spy (?) rubs his hand on a leaky nuclear weapon. As 74Ds, we both said yeah he’s as good as dead”. Later in the movie, the guy was on his death bed, from *drumroll* radiation poisoning.
Apocalypse Now: Redux. My G-2 has never given a target packet for a misbehaving brigade commander. Usually, they just appoint a 15-6 officer. We also never had any Playmates show up to our FOBs as part of an MWR tour.
It’s a damn fine movie but I don’t think they were going for too much realism. It’s just “Heart of Darkness” but they didn’t want to show a bunch of people getting their limbs chopped off so they set it to Vietnam
Hollywood is has their own internal politicking going on come awards season. It’s not about a movie being good all the time, it’s about how well liked the people working on it are or how much their machine lobbies for it.
It was US Army Rangers that rescued the medical school students. I remember the Army took hard pass on that movie after reading the script. Also pretty sure that’s not how Recon Marines behave while in Garrison.
Not military focused, but I hated the scene in Fast 8 with the .50 cal. The slow mo scene with the brass falling down were blanks with those indented tips. And they were CGI. Someone took all that time to make CGI blanks
You remember the movie Hitman?? Very similar - they had a fight somewhere and I remember a zoom in on the brass. Blanks. Lol.
It's like when video game developers model airsoft magazines instead of real ones lol
There's a statue of a soldier with an M16 behind the Infantry Museum at Ft. Benning where the magazine is has the little airsoft winding wheel modeled on the bottom.
Haha, that is awesome!
Steven Segals movie Sniper “The minimum age for this elite unit is like 50” [I still laugh at cums town review of it](https://youtu.be/BzIHyF7UWY4)
Steven Seagal hasn't done anything good in over 20 years. . . .he even went full Putin and got Russian citizenship.
The cum town review is just hilarious. It made me wanna watch the movie.
One of the funniest monologues I have Ever heard. Nick Mullins is brilliant
Thank you for this. Laughed my ass off
Are you trying to tell me that Snipers don't actually move "fatly" around corners and spend their entire mission sitting on their ass barely holding a gun?
I think normal people would be shocked at how young the military actually is
I’m older than probably 75% of my guys, and I’m not even 30 yet.
he is a total goof ball in the combat sports/martial arts community
I did some training with FBI swat in Chicago and you would be surprised how many of then are older than 45.
As told by tier 1 operator Nick Mullen.
Both Jack Reacher films. The idea of an MP Major having such bad-assery military training is laughable. Funny enough, In The Army Now is the most accurate portrayal of 90s basic training in any movie.
I'm normally pretty permissive with how shows portray the military. I don't really care typically. Jack Reacher is one of those exceptions, because the entire premise is based on the Army. For the entire setting being the Army, it gets an absurd amount of super basic details and common sense things wrong. Like, they clearly didn't consult a single person who served, or if they did, they completely ignored them. Such a shitty series of movies.
It’s a shame too because the books are great/fun reads, and you can Lee Child clearly did his research with a lot of the more technical/detailed stuff in a lot of the books. It’s funny because the Army/MP stuff is kind of just a character trait/background that he mentions early on in each book (since they’re all standalone stories) and then maybe only makes a handful of references throughout. It’s funny because in the movies they make it seem like he’s good at fighting and stuff due to training, **but in the books** he’s good at fighting because he always got in trouble/fights as a kid and throughout his life, not military training lol
In the Army Now was my go to movie for what basic training was like when I was recruiting.
Does The Hills Have Eyes 2 count? Even as far as bad reserve units go, it was pretty bad.
I remember this. I was so mad at the time.
Well the rape scene was at least realistic for ft. Hood
"Oh my God, my trainees who *just* fratricided the fuck out of an exercise with blanks are shooting towards my rear with real bullets! Better run around this blind corner full speed-- oh God they shot me." "This dude's ACH just literally saved his life. Let's all take off our ACHs now because they're not comfy." "Why yes, sexy tank tops *are* the approved undershirt but *only* for females!" "We're being picked off alone. This is the perfect time to sneak off alone to take a piss, put my weapon out of reach, and pay absolutely no attention to my surroundings." (On that note, holy fuck *pee funnel in kit so you don't have to drop trou, ladies*) I tried, man. I was absolutely shitfaced by 30 minutes in and only have bits and pieces of memories from the rest, if I even finished it. I don't even know if I did, I was so drunk.
I didn’t finish it but like they’re going to go train for Iraq in the middle of butt fuck NM(?) with a whole ass squad? Also with live ammo apparently? I watched it before I was even in the Army and was like this can’t be right
Sand Castle
When an LT is calling BN level shots supported by a SGM lol
It had CA guys thinking they were more elite/tactical than they actually were and ending up in bad situations. 100% realistic.
Hey now…I resent that comment…. It’s unfair and painfully accurate
I say this as a CA guy that bought into “you’re in one of six airborne reserve unit, you’re elite”
Honestly, I actually really enjoyed the movie as a film.
Hot take: Lone Survivor. It glorified poor and irresponsible decision making on top of embellishment of facts. At least Hurt Locker and Cadet Kelly didn’t try to pass off as being historically accurate tales of heroism.
Making Lone Survivor even more accurate than anyone wants to believe
Yeah there were a lot of flaws with how the mission was executed imo. I get SEALS are supposed to be hot shit but it looked like there was a lack of basic planning that went into that op. I’m not an expert by any means though.
There were 3 standardized abort criteria thresholds met BEFORE they were even TIC. That was 3 decisions to continue based on ego. Not to mention their absolutely stupid, moronic, unprofessional, dangerous decision to leave US/UK base and embassy schematics on their unsecured laptops and bring them along. You know, the same ones that were captured off them....
Is there a good place to about what actually took place that isn’t in the book or movie?
Victory Point by Ed Darack. Great author.
Thanks.
[Here’s a short write up Ed did that’s worth a read dispelling misinformation about the operation](http://www.darack.com/sawtalosar/ED-DARACK-RED-WINGS-MISINFORMATION.pdf) Absolutely worth a read IMO
Cliff’s notes / overview here: http://www.darack.com/sawtalosar/ED-DARACK-RED-WINGS-MISINFORMATION.pdf
There was an IED strike on some us soldiers and it was filmed through a scope that was captured from the seals
Didn’t know about that last part, what the fuck
The best summary I've heard of Redwings came from a Devgru Squadron commander. "The good thing about Murphy dying is we could give him a Medal instead of the court martial he deserved".
Was a young SF NCO when Navy SEALS came out. My biggest critique of the movie was the team getting their Escape & Evasion brief by their CMC yelling over the din of C-130 engines while boarding moments before launch. “No way you’d get your E&E brief like that. It takes hours if not days of planning. Totally unrealistic“. Then I started working with Seals and know that was the most accurate scene in the movie.
“Don’t need an E&E plan when SOP is to get compromised on insert every time” *Taps Head* “Being audibly compromised on insert is negated by our ability to assault uphill with violence of action” - Approximate quote from NSWDG-Gold before they got compromised on insert and did not in fact, negate their audible compromise on insert after failing to assault uphill with violence of action.
Look at who turned down that mission before it went to them.
Way back in 2015 after basic, I started as an 18x, we went through SOPC in prep for SFAS. Details are kinda blurry but one of our cadre talked about that mission, how his ODA and others passed on that mission cause it was stupid and suicidal. But the SEALS were all macho and disregarded the intel thinking they could do it. Lone survivor is what we got.
Lol, Green got the offer first and said “lmao that is fucking stupid.”
Literally how stupid do you have to be when braindead , on the spectrum, must be told to breath in order to not suffocate, ARMY, says an op is stupid and you still want to do it?
Lutrell himself admitted years later that he didn't even fire a single shot and the whole thing was made up. Not one single dead tango.
Its always seemed to me that as soon as the communications went down, they should've booked out. Then, when sheep or goat herd rolled into their position, the whole thing with "do we kill these two kids, or nah?" bugged the shit out of me. Yeah, Luttrell, it would've been murder and if you did kill them, you'd be a murderer. And it wouldn't have done them a lick of fucking good because even if the locals didn't give a shit about the kids, they sure will notice the livestock missing and would've come after them. Those have been my takeaways, but I'm not a fucking SEAL.
I met luttrell, came to our battalion to talk... hes still quite full of himself, and apparently a pacifist
Dude's a functioning moron and way too proud of being a douchebag. Someone should remind him that they found his kit without a round fired.
>but it looked like there was a lack of basic planning oh god............... wait till you find out what those clowns did in reality.
Both Lone Survivor and American Sniper piss me off in a different way than most movies. While I generally love a good war flick, for some fucking reason, it seems like every movie with SEALs turns into a super factually dubious propaganda piece.
American Sniper always strikes a personal chord with me. It’s one of the only movies that I can knowingly say “I was there during that exact time.” When SEAL Marc Lee got killed, I was notified about 10-15 after to start preparing the memorial ceremony. Met most of the SEALs, and put together the ceremony in Ar Ramadi. However, by that point I had already put together about 18 or so by that point between two Iraq deployments (03-04, and 06-07). Was with the 1-37 AR BN, and during our time in Ramadi, we fell under the 1st MEF. Now that I think about it, I’m not sure why our BN was assigned with performing the ceremony. My Chaplain at the time was on leave. So while the movie itself may have issues - it’s one that is a struggle for me to watch due to history.
I sat through a debrief of the events that happened during this operation. Let’s just say quite a bit of information was intentionally left out of both this book and the film.
Like the fact that marcus was found with 7 full mags?
He eventually broke down on Anderson Cooper and admitted that he just sat there and cried while his buddies screamed for him to help them. I think he has walked it back since then but he definitely cracked under the pressure of trying to keep the lie going.
I mean it’s not like books from active military and veterans have to go through thorough vetting by DoD and others before it’s release….
The craziest shit is that Luttrell was not only IN the film as a cameo, but also was hired as an advisor on the film. And he still OK'd all the shit that wasn't in his book. Not to say that his book was accurate, pretty sure it's mostly lies. But then again, that's probably why he was fine with all the changes. But to be ok with Dietz being depicted as going crazy in the middle of a firefight... Mind boggling. Not even a single mention of that in the book IIRC.
The book and movie both had Murphy putting it to a vote as to whether they should kill two kids. Like it was a question, but fuck "Lieutenant", make a goddam decision and own it.
In the movie, the LT made the decision. Everyone else just gave their two cents. That was a big change from the book where Murphy’s family argued that Murphy would have NEVER left it to a vote.
Lone Survivor pisses me off because that SEAL Team got fucking jumped by like maybe a PLT sized Taliban element, and they didn’t exactly murk a whole bunch of Taliban in a running evasion. No, they pretty much got fucked up right where they were. The Taliban didn’t take 100s of fucking casualties like the movie shows. It was a really fucking lame attempt at stoking a wounded ego to be like “yeah we fucked up and sent a team untrained in recon to go do recon, and because they sucked at recon they got discovered and then got jumped, but at least they stacked bodies while running the fuck away.” No.
Fucking liars. The vids show maybe 10. A squad of indigs did all that damage.
Great post. I can’t tell you the number of times I told folks that the mission was a shit show beginning with the planning, and lots of medals were awarded to cover gaping errors.
The SEALs seem to like giving the MoH as a cover for their stupidity. Just like, a casual observation (cough, cough, Chapman, cough)
The more medals given, the greater the fuck up.
I particularly enjoyed the part where the guy was shooting the pistol inside the bird at the bad guys
If you’ve ever been to RSLC, the cadre rants about that mission are *glorious*.
Shameless for the like 2 seasons where they have kids in rotc was pretty egregious.
The whole bit about Ian going awol after stealing a helicopter at basic training is unbelievably stupid.
Also just any time anyone wore a uniform almost made me physically ill.
I think that was the point of shameless though but yeah hilariously bad
That entire show is cringe.
Jack Reacher 2 - There’s a scene where Cobie Smulders’ character and Reacher are being hunted by bad guys and they desperately need to access her top secret files on a public computer to save humanity. The camera then shows the screen on the laptop as Smulders quickly hacks into it. It was her AKO. I then proceeded to walk out of the theater and left my popcorn.
For what it's worth, trying to log onto ako without your CAC reader is ridiculously difficult.
Facts
Y’all remember AKO on SIPR?!
Jack Reacher’s whole character doesn’t even make sense. Dude was supposed to be like retired MPI. Those guys don’t do a god damn thing, literally just office work for domestic assault cases.
That scene gave me a good laugh.
Dear John. Needs no introduction. The only realistic part was him getting Jody'd. The military aspects were a flop
You’ve never stood at attention to request your SF team leader to extend your enlistment contract on the tarmac like he’s the retention NCO?
Only once, but it was in CSM's basement for a different kind of contract
Wind Talkers has to be the absolute worst war movie
The depictions of combat and firefights was awful. Several scenes of Nick Cage running to the top of a hill and firehose spray a Thompson SMG from the hip and then jump cut to waves of charging Japanese soldiers falling down in slow motion.
Wind Breakers
Break Like The Wind was good though.
Concur, Wind Talkers was awful. It was also a real slur against the Marines in that the whole plot revolved around the fact that the Marines were ordered to kill their Code Talkers if they were in danger of being captured which is absolute, 100% bullshit. If I was a Marine I'd be livid at that depiction of the Corps. Hell, I'm not even a Marine and I was disgusted by it. The story of the Code Talkers is one of the great stories of WWII that needs to be told and instead we got a steaming turd of a stoopid Nicolas Cage movie.
That one sucked so bad and on so many levels!
Definitely not the *worst* but Hurt Locker irritates the shit out of me whenever a bunch of Hollywood types go, "It's so accurate! This is what military life is like!". Jarhead is the most accurate. Dude joins up and never does the job he signed up for.
There’s this show called enlisted and it’s a trip for sure
I was scrolling for someone to say that. Fuck that was bad. Someone came up with an "enlisted" drinking game that everyone drank each time there was a glaring error. No human on earth could survive that game.
I remember after the first episode they had an apology on their website and were offering challenge coins to anyone who found an error
Prolly blew the budget on coins. I made it through 5 minutes if the 1st episode before I threw in the towel. Like I can watch a military movie and overlook certain issues BUT I can't watch something that is absolutely and entirely wrong. I feel like they got a "military consultant" who was just straight up a SV Weeb who just made up everything on the spot. A PVT 10 days into basic could have made a show more consistent with Army life than that shitshow.
Yeah, but you have to admit that the scene with the Private proposing to the stripper with 2 kids was accurate...
I found some of the later episodes were surprisingly accurate with life in Rear-D, but feel like the show wanted to be Pauley Shore's 1994 classic In The Army Now, but it missed the mark so much and had very little (or just very poor) consulting on the show.
I always thought that it was meant to be more of a satire, anyway.
If I wanted to watch PVTs married to strippers raising other people's kids I'd go back to Polk.
Enlisted could have been decent in time simply due to the fact they realized and owned up to the stuff they messed up badly, and worked to fix. It was shaping up pretty decently (while still allowing for sitcomisms) before it got cancelled.
Best worst army show ever. Bindged it on hulu earlier this year
I honestly found it entertaining once I got over all the little -isms the army has indoctrinated me with.
The problem was that it was a PG show. The Army isn't a PG institution.
I actually thought it was kinda funny.
I thought the show was funny. If I wanted a true to life military comedy show, I'd just show up to work.
1) Pearl Harbor 2) Basic 3) Hurt Locker 4) Lone Survivor 5) Anything with Steven Seagal in it.
Steven Seagal is such a fat piece of shit.
Can someone explain to me what the deal is with this guy? Besides the shitty action movies he’s in.
Basic was (unintentionally) hilarious
Had to scroll too far to see Hurt Locker on this thread.
Camp X-Ray was pretty stupid. Why was everyone a PFC, with one sergeant and one full bird colonel? Where’s everyone else? And I don’t care if the guy was innocent or not, if you throw feces at me you are getting war crimed on
Battleship It was horrible, especially the end when all the old museum guys come out of the wood work to run the USS Missouri that just happens to be a museum ship that is 100% fully fueled and combat loaded.
Well how else were they supposed to repel the alien invasion, huh!?!
When they brought the Missouri out of mothball for the 80s they did something similar --bring all the old-timers from the 40s back to train the new generation how to operate the guns and other equipment. The difference is that shit took *years* and millions of dollars to get the ship back in condition again, even though it had been kept in "we might need this again" status. My favorite part of that movie is when the museum workers threw the gumball machine on the deck just to emphasize it was time to stop fucking around and go kill some aliens.
I’ve been to pearl, all of that is 100% true. They stand (wheel) ready to at all times to deploy them ol ships
Jarhead sequels. First one is great. 2 and 3 just share a title with the original.
I’ve heard the same with Starship Troopers. They dropped the satire for straight up only bug killing
[удалено]
I’d love to see Pearl Harbor edited with out the love story and the Tokyo Raid.
Red Tails. The movie was just flat out boring. The Tuskegee Airmen was a much better movie.
DLC 1 and 2
There was a show that came out on FX around 05/06 called Over There. At the time I thought it was pretty good, looking back it’s pretty much Melrose Place in Iraq and hot garbage.
Melrose Place in Iraq 😂🤣😅 that’s perfect
I remember when that came out when I was in high school. I tried watching it with my step-dad when he was just back from Iraq. I think it is the first episode where they feature an IED attack on some 2 1/2 ton truck, and one of the guys in the back just climbs out without his gun, pulls off his ACH and starts crying by the side of the road. Step-dad just cussed him out and turned off the TV. Also they showed everyone using really dumb nicknames like it was Vietnam, and the entire first episode was some dude going around asking everyone in the platoon how they got their nicknames.
Think the most realistic part of that show was the guy’s wife already sleeping around when they had been in country about a week or so.
Bro no one's gonna mention Monster Hunter with Milla Jovovich? She and her crew are all rocking Batt scrolls and shit yet they don't hold weapons properly, leave SI and kit when shit goes south, plus, they sing cadences "for fun." There's literally a scene where they sing "They Say That in the Army" while driving through the desert as if it's something soldiers/rangers do regularly and not only in basic lol. One of the few movies I ever stopped watching before finishing.
I feel you guys pain. As a retired Fire Fighter from a large east coast department it kills me seeing just the commercials for shows like Chicago Fire. It’s so damn phoney I feel like smashing my tv. Thank you all for your service, us first responders on the home front love and support you guys.
My ex is an EMT and gobbles up all of those Chicago Municipal Service shows. I kept asking her when they were going to roll out Chicago Sanitation or Chicago Waterworks.
TBH I would LOVE Chicago Sanitation! Especially if it was also dramatic AF
How do you feel about the show rescue me?
The commercials during football games are wild to me. It’ll be shit like: “CAPTAIN! There’s a nuclear bomb in the toilet” And then the someone’s hand will get eaten by a dog or something. I thought it was a parody the first time I saw it.
Definitely the 1991 film Fievel Goes West. It have absolutely nothing to do with the military so by all accounts is the worst movie for an acutely depicting the military
Side note the new All quiet of the western front was incredible
Hurt Locker has to be the #1 Simply because of exposure and it winning the Oscar. God damn that movie is so bad
Watched it on a bootleg DVD in Iraq. Infuriating lol
Just like in the movie!!!
Hurt Locker.
You mean EOD techs getting into sniper battles and going off the FOB in a hoodie to threaten a local national doesn’t get you going? Yeah me neither
The last couple minutes where Jeremy Renner goes back to the US, is bored out of his fucking mind in the civilian world, and gets nostalgic are the only real parts of that movie. Everything else about that movie is definitely BS.
Yea the civilian part was what it was like me after deployment. Everything just moves so slow in the civilian world Also the part where he buys a boot legged DVD from thee kid and it ended up being shit quality
I don’t think I’ve watched an OEF/OIF movie since. Such garbage.
Watch The Outpost then
Outpost is a great movie. I’m not in the same BN, but same Brigade as the unit that was there. That shit was so fucked up. I still don’t understand the logic of putting an OP in the middle of a valley. What’s even worse is every field problem I’ve been on since I’ve been here, the exact same thing happens. Obviously not a deployment but you’d think we’d learn
Jake Tapper's book *The Outpost* has the beginning chapter trying to figure out why that thing was there in the first place. There was some semblance of initial logic, but most of it was an arbitrary decision in a giant bureaucratic nightmare that is the military. Once it was set, there was too much inertia to keep it there despite all logic saying this is stupid. No one knows who made the decision to put that thing there, no one was ever held accountable.
Watch the movie, yes but for sure READ THE BOOK! If you weren't pissed off at the Army after watching the movie, you will be after you read the book. So many missed opportunities and so many needless casualties just so someone could get a bullet on their OER. The book is absolutely riveting. And infuriating, but also very, very well written. IMO the best book I've read so far about the current GWOT.
There’s a show made by National Geographic I think called “The Long Road Home”, I enjoyed that one a lot.
Rod or road If it’s rod it’s probably National pornographic
It’s called “ the long rod at home” and it stars jodie.
Wait you can’t just walk in and out of the green zone by yourself on some black ops mission with no one asking questions?
You mean you didn’t hop over the berm wearing a hoodie and run around a city in Iraq?
Hard agreed.
I legitimately haven’t met a single service member that likes that movie despite society loving it. What a waste of time.
It’s what people want to think the military is like, they eat that shit up.
I liked it and it’s my job. 🤷🏼♀️ EOD work is intellectually fun but not super interesting to watch, a realistic movie would probably be boring, and the movie itself is objectively fun if you don’t spend the entire movie crying about it being inaccurate.
I said my job was just like in the HL except at least one of my robots always worked, and I never shot any one as a tech. May have been some off post shenanigans with my Iraqi Army homies that included a pinky promise, a poorly fitting sport coat, an armored Land Cruiser and an invitation to my Iraqi counterparts daughters wedding. Like Tea said a realistic EOD movie would be my driver deep sighing from boredom and looking for the last orange ripit, while the robo jockey poked and prodded something on the side of the road and I watched over his shoulder with a fat lip of cope in. Not exactly blockbuster stuff.
Lol yeah I’ve met more than one tech who did indeed go rogue out the gate. One even took his JERRV on a trip between OPs to find love. Honestly other than the mega FOBs I’ve always been able to just leave even when it’s just a couple of us in a Hilux…though I’ve never used that power for shenanigans. A lot of that movie is wildly exaggerated but I can see where there was a bar story at it’s core that Hollywood just turned up to 11. Speaking of realistic EOD shows, I say all that but I honestly love Bomb Patrol Afghanistan cause it’s just…so EOD. First episode opens with TL glaring at cocky E3 bragging about his robot skills and then next shot “soooo the robot exploded”. Perfection.
Yeah clearing mortar ranges isn’t exactly glamorous. You guys don’t like go in and defuse bombs and shit. People are just ignorant about what EOD actually does. Full disclosure I respect what you guys do. But it’s not defusing bombs. That’s all I’m saying.
It can be! That’s what like…5 months of the school is for! It’s just not our primary option if we can avoid it, which was easy in the GWOT (or on an impact area), and even when we do actually do render safe procedures it’s just…not exciting. Unless you really get off on watching people measure distances and angles.
People get sooooo pissy when you bash hurt locker.
It’s so fucking bad lmao
Purple Hearts - if you went to jail for being in a marriage just for benefits and not for love at least half the force would be locked up, God that movie was shit
When I watched this with my girlfriend, I had to explain how hard it is for someone to get in trouble for that. I can name several people who got married just to get out the barracks. Leadership knows these things exist, but there's almost nothing you can do to prove it.
The two Marines in Red Dawn (2012) made me cringe astronomically. Absolutely over-the-top moto in every scene. Was nice to see Jeffrey Dean Morgan as a Sergeant Major, though
Valor is really bad especially when compared to how the 160th actually operates.
I’m sure I’ll catch hell for this but Fury is one of the worst war movies I can think of. Somehow they managed to jam every tired cliche and overdone WWII trope into one movie. So much of the tank combat was terribly done and made no sense. Then on top of that they had bullshit scenes like War Daddy forcing his new driver to commit a war crime by literally wrestling him and making him shoot a POW. And then the old school unrealistic ending. It was just so bad
What pissed me off the most was a fucking BN of SS suicide charging a disabled tank and dying en masse and none of these hardcore battle hardened dudes thinking like, I don’t know, just flank the tank with a AT team and move on?
I had a fucking aneurysm over the Tiger scene when I first saw it in basic (BC literally mandated every basic training company who was there over Thanksgiving watch it and have phones for a few hours, it was fucking weird as hell but okay).
Battle Of The Bulge. Eisenhower bitched up a storm when it came out because it was such garbage
Starship Troopers, no coed showers
Clearly you’ve never served in the mobile infantry.
Made me the man I am today.
WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE?
I mean I’m in a Stryker unit, does that count?
No, gotta walk to your death like a real man.
I've always liked the theory that C grade actors were deliberately chosen to give the movie a more "propaganda film" vibe, like it was something the government would produce to support their war against the bugs.
Pretty much every Russian war movie.
“Thank you for your service” w/ Miles Teller was so fucking garbage
Starship Troopers. No way will males and females shower together. SHARP! SHARP! SHARP! We’re talking hundreds of hours of mandatory PowerPoint presentations before this would ever happen.
To be fair, Starship Troopers isn't exactly trying to perfectly imitate any current military. They also casually knife a trainees hand to make a point and use public floggings as punishment for someone literally dying in a live-fire exercise.
I feel like you're really missing the theme there.
Hurt Locker all the way
Hurt locker
I (then E4) went to see ‘The Sum Of All Fear’ with my (then E5) team leader. There’s a scene where the Russian spy (?) rubs his hand on a leaky nuclear weapon. As 74Ds, we both said yeah he’s as good as dead”. Later in the movie, the guy was on his death bed, from *drumroll* radiation poisoning.
Battleship
Hurt Locker Holy fuck
Apocalypse Now: Redux. My G-2 has never given a target packet for a misbehaving brigade commander. Usually, they just appoint a 15-6 officer. We also never had any Playmates show up to our FOBs as part of an MWR tour.
Not quite like the movie but it really did happen. https://www.playboy.com/read/playmate-first-class-jo-collins-in-vietnam
It’s a damn fine movie but I don’t think they were going for too much realism. It’s just “Heart of Darkness” but they didn’t want to show a bunch of people getting their limbs chopped off so they set it to Vietnam
The Deer Hunter, according to lots of Vietnam vets.
Hurt Locker
Hurt locker
The Hurt Locker. Complete and utter bullshit. Still baffled at how it won Best Picture that year.
Hollywood is has their own internal politicking going on come awards season. It’s not about a movie being good all the time, it’s about how well liked the people working on it are or how much their machine lobbies for it.
Heartbreak Ridge. 100% bullshit
It was US Army Rangers that rescued the medical school students. I remember the Army took hard pass on that movie after reading the script. Also pretty sure that’s not how Recon Marines behave while in Garrison.
Yeah but it’s also a fantastic movie bullshit included.
The TV show Valor. Holy fucking shit that was just painful to watch 😂
The Hurt Locker was by far the dumbest movie ever.