Yesterday we went to see „Avatar“ (no not this one), James Camerons new gazillion-budget-show of aliens and the usual military vehicles and battles. A funny ethno-circus with characters drawn with a butchers knife and a black and white-view of the world that made my brain hurt. Proof again that a gripping story told well is all it needs to make a good movie, and that the most spectacular special effects can’t make a bad story fly.
The Wrath of the Red Baron
Cameron follows the “classic” SciFi style of depicting battles in the future basically as close-up melees between mechanized humans and aliens. As soon as the movie leaves its realistic looking spaceship, it all boils down to a melee or even hand-to-hand combat.
Needless to say, “Avatar” here follows the lead of World War II fighterplane combat as seen in countless other movies like Star Wars or both Battlestar Galactica series. I assume the logic is that you need to sacrifice realism to enhance the viewing experience, as some rockets impacting out of nowhere – i.e. with a speed quicker than the human eye – would simply dissapoint viewers and feel unemotional. Or rather produce the wrong emotions: You only get the grief and the sadness of people dying, and not the heroism the public seems to long for.
This quest for heroism borders on the absurd if you see aliens riding on horses charging mechanized infantry armed with automatic weapons – a move so suicidal it was deemed a folly way before World War I, and despite the popular image of Polish Hussars in the September of ’39, never happened since.
“Whatever happens we have got / The Maxim Gun, and they have not”
Now even written military fiction in general is prone to produce ideas that seem absurd or comical at best a couple of years later like George Chesney’s “Battle of Dorking” (published in 1871) in which Great Britain succumbs to a Prussian invasion. A century later, the militia-inspiring “Vandenberg” depicts a bunch of guerillas in the US defeating a Soviet occupation force. On the more technical side, both “amateur” and professional soldiers have a long history of failing to grasp future developments. For every Jan Gottlieb Bloch who accurately depicted the horrors of trench warfare there are three writers like Loyzeau de Grandmasion or Douglas Haig, the former insisting in “moral factors” being able to overcome machine-gun fire, the latter insisting on the viability of cavalry charges in the face of entrenched infantry – in 1922. Modern prophets or warfare haven’t fared too well, either – take for example a look at MacNamaras “whizz kids” trying to get a grip on the war in Vietnam with tables and efficiency percentages, body kills and the first widespread use of computers, a tragedy repeated in the second Iraq invasion of 2004 to no avail. On the fictional side, we return to the introduction of this post – the absurd dogfights of Star Wars or the ironclad-style braodsides that are exchanged between spaceships in Star Trek.
In the following posts, I would like to examine some threads of military development and, by simply extrapolating them, identify some unchangable basics of warfare, if any of those can be found and described.