It's been so long I can't even remember the original, haven't watched the new one yet.
I guess I'm thinking of films like Come and See, vs films like Where Eagles Dare. Some films are more balanced and nuanced. His description of the film as grim is what made me think that this version might serve more as deterrent than glorification.
There's plenty of heroism and patriotism in war, and I appreciate anyone who put their lives on the line to preserve our country, but overall, I think we're doing a disservice to the public any time we paint war itself as anything other that a tragedy. There are glorious moments of good triumphing over evil, but never without a huge number of innocent people getting their lives destroyed forever.
WW2 really was a patriotic fight against tyranny, but a lot of what we've done since boils down to dropping $80,000 auto guided bombs onto people armed with skillets, who would have gladly stopped fighting if we gave them 25c worth of ramen to eat. Then we fly our billion dollar stealth bombers home and say "I think one of those skillets almost grazed me" I'm glad my side is winning, but it's hard not to feel sorry for all those people from oil countries that got blown apart trying to wash their one shirt in a creek. If we valued people as much as we value weapons, we probably wouldn't need as many weapons.
Here's an article about a little kid who hides when he sees a blue sky. That's when the robots come to kill everyone.
"I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer grey skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are grey," a 13-year-old Pakistani boy named Zubair told Congress today. Zubair and his younger sister, Nabeela, were injured in a drone strike near North Waziristan last October.
www.theatlantic.com
Where it gets really interesting is when you realize that we're right now on the precipice of a new military tech rollout that will change war forever. Something arguably worse than the A bomb. AI ground soldiers and low flying drones. It's not a matter of if they will be used, but when, and by who. I don't think anyone can imagine the horrors that will occur the first time a full scale drone army executes a land invasion. Try and imagine drones flying house to house in a suburban neighborhood in Cleveland, shooting people through the walls of their houses with heat vision. The only reason that that hasn't happened yet is because no one has decided to do it yet. It's possible right now with current technology. Technically, a psychopath with infinite resources could kill the entire population of another country in a week. That's my worst nightmare, that somewhere beneath a city in China or Russia, there is a man made cave with tens of thousands of flying death machines, like the wildfire caches in Game of Thrones.
