Leadership Movies

 I recently watched the Mel Gibson movie We Were Soldiers about America taking the Vietnam War baton from the French. Setting aside the dubious use of death and violence as entertainment, I enjoyed the film and appreciated its portrayal of a culture of which I'm certain Hollywood has very little understanding. I don't mean the culture of Vietnam, but the culture of honor and leadership that has been central to the militaries of the West for centuries. That culture now appears to be suffering a quick and grotesque death, partly caused by the intrepid degeneracy of Hollywood, but that's what actors do: pretend to be something they're not. Every now and then, though, Hollywood gets it right and produces a film that showcases the best of humanity: moral, humble, confident, God-fearing, and self-sacrificing.

(Interestingly aside: in recent decades Mel Gibson has been the writer, directory, producer and/or lead actor in a high percentage of those films.)

Entertainment will always reflect the character of the culture that spawns it, but it can also have a powerful influence on that culture. A positive feedback loop, for good or ill.

Below is a list of movies and TV series that I think showcase great leaders and leadership. It will start small, because I can only think of a couple right now, but I'll add more when I think of them or encounter them. Feel free to make suggestions in the comments. 

It's not an accident that most of them have military themes. Stories about leadership are much easier to come by in very high stress, dangerous environments.

Your mileage may vary, so check reviews and ratings, and possibly screen everything here before letting your children watch them. No movie is perfect and your standards are certain to differ from my own in many important respects. 

• We Were Soldiers: Mel Gibson, Madeleine Stowe, Greg Kinnear, Sam Elliott, Barry Pepper, et al
• The Lost Battalion: Ricky Schroder, Phil McKee, Adam James, et al
• 12 Angry Men: Henry Fonda, Lee Cob, Jack Klugman, et al
• Enders Game: Harrison Ford, Asa Butterfield, Hailee Steinfeld, et al
• Guardians of the Galaxy, vol 3: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, et al
• Glory: Matthew Broderick, Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, et al
• Dune Part Two: Timothee Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, et al
• World War Z: Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, Daniella Kertesz, et al
• Zulu: Stanley Baker, Jack Hawkins, et al
• Arctic: Mads Mikkelsen, Maria Smaradottir

I started watching Stargate Atlantis, and after 6 episodes, it seems a great counterpoint to the list above. Lots of examples of terrible leadership except for Robert Patrick's character, Colonel Sumner, in episode 1. Maybe. As I continue watching, it's apparent that this is one of those shows in which all the characters take turns being ridiculously stupid. 

I'm also going to add books to this list, as I come across them.

• The Spiral Wars (9 book series, so far. The whole series). Joel Shepherd

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Approaching Absurdity

War, Inc. is a twisted, cynical caricature of America's commercialized foreign adventurism. The invasion and occupation of an imaginary Middle Eastern country (Turaqistan) has been contracted out to a private company who sells advertising space on tanks and formulates bombing campaigns based on profit potential. Cusack is an assassin/project manager who has been assigned to kill a Tadjik oil man, while he also hosts the wedding of an American-made, Turaqi pop princess (Hillary Duff) at the grand opening of an American-made shopping mall in the ruined national capital. Marisa Tomei is a reporter trying to get behind the commercial facade to find out what's really going on in Turaqistan. Twenty years ago this would have simply been absurd comedy, something from Mel Brooks. Today, it's still absurd, but it's not so funny. It's too close to our absurd reality.

Cusack and Tomei don't deliver very inspiring performances, but Duff was better than I expected. That's probably not saying much. Nobody gets any respect in this movie. Rodney Dangerfield would have approved. It wasn't great, but still worth watching just for the insane portrayal of America's national past-time.

Zeitgeist the Movie

I just finished watching the documentary Zeitgeist...OK, I'm lying. I just finished scanning through it. I watched the first 25 minutes then started skipping through.

They definitely got off on the wrong foot with me by making several disprovable assertions and claiming certainty about some things that are based on card-houses of unlikely or unprovable assumptions. For example, they start out by implying that most, if not all, mass violence is the result of religion and patriotism (aka tribalism). The religion claim has been thoroughly debunked repeatedly over the last hundred years or so, most recently and possibly most thoroughly by Vox Day in The Irrational Atheist. On the contrary, religion is a moderating influence that helps to contain the natural agression of mankind. The irony of the movie's claims against religion is that they are perfectly in line with the zeitgeist of today's "intelligentsia" yet are at least as false and manipulative as the move claims are religious institutions. That doesn't mean that religious bureaucracies are necessarily benevolent or honest, of course. They are still made up of people after all, and people are the real problem.

That takes care of the disprovable assertions. On to the house of unprovable cards.

Another irony of the movie is that it begins with a quote decrying the reliance on authority over truth rather than authority out of truth, but then it shows our supposed evolution from bacteria and the supposed evolution of all theology from astronomy through astrology. The theory of evolution, whether correct or not, is an unprovable set of speculations based on other speculations based on assumptions stemming from the a priori disbarring of even the possibility of divine intervention in natural history. In other words, complete acceptance of TENS (the theory of evolution and natural selection) is a complete acceptance of authority over truth rather than authority out of truth.

The same is true regarding the evolution of religion. The movie adopts some historical revisionism as well as a huge load of historical speculation and labels it TRUTH. There is some truth to be had, however. Here's what I think happened: God knew exactly what was going to happen on earth from the moment he created the universe. He designed things into that creation so that certain truths could be gleaned from careful observation. People way back when were smarter than us and managed to combine oral tradition, divine revelation, and astronomical observation to arrive at those certain truths regarding the nature of mankind, God, and the future course of history. They understood something of the nature of blood in our relationship to the divine (certainly more than I do) and the need for divine intervention and in order to bring about a full restoration of that relationship. Satan was able to use their smarts against them in building counterfeit theologies that incorporated a lot of truth into a lot of B.S. (Kind of like politicians, theologians, and movie makers.) Babylonian, Greek, and Egyptian gods were killed and resurrected because the really bright people of those days knew that had to be part of any true theology. They drew certain stories out of the movements of stars and planets because those stories are actually there.

That's when I skipped ahead a bit. The rest of the movie seems to point out several examples of the masses being manipulated by clever politicians and marketeers. There is a lot of good information in there that people need to know. I probably would have watched more intently if I hadn't already learned most of it from other sources. I already know that people are violent, greedy liars, and that we all want to believe otherwise. We're prepared to swallow any amount of b.s. to maintain our belief in the essential goodness of humankind. Blech. At some level we're all murderers. We're all thieves. We're all gullible lemmings.

There is really only one source of completely reliable truth. I don't mean human translations or interpretations of ancient revelations. The Bible would be totally reliable if we still had it in its original forms, but people have gotten in the way. It's still pretty darn good and the closest thing we have to absolute truth in written form, but there might be a corrupt word or even a paragraph here and there. The only reliable source of truth is God. Our big problem is that we are corrupted receivers, hence the hundreds of different religions and the thousands of denominations within them. The problem is us, not God.

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Seven Samurai

Seven Samurai (aka Shichinin no Samurai) is the Japanese version of The Magnificent Seven. Vice versa actually. Samurai was made six years earlier.

A remote village in 16th century Japan has been under the thumb of bandits for several years. When the bandits promise to return after the barley harvest, the villagers determine to fight back by hiring seven down on their luck samurai. The story and acting was good. Yoshio Tsuchiya and Takashi Shimura were great. The character and subplot involving Rikichi's wife could have used a little more attention. The battle scenes were sometimes very confusing. (Maybe that was on purpose. I've heard combat can be that way.)

What I found most interesting was a glimpse into how the Japanese see their own past and how almost no attempt was made to glamorize the characters or setting. There were no knights in shining armor, no super-human martial acrobatics, and very little selfless heroism. This was a story about real people in a dirty world and in bad situation.

Worth watching.

The Game Plan: Good Call

When I checked the movie listings I didn't even mention this one to my son. I didn't think he'd be interested in a cute father-daughter story. Instead, we settled on Martian Child despite my misgivings about the pro-homosexual theme of the original book. (The reviews said that Cusack's character had been straightened for the movie version.) However, as soon as he saw The Game Plan on the marquee, all thoughts of cardboard boxes were out.

I was expecting another story featuring an incompetent father, but I was pleasantly surprised. Johnson's character was vain and self-obsessed, but not stupid. I think the audience heard the line, "Peyton needs her father," so many times that someone out there might get the idea that the writers think fathers are more than sperm donors and cash cows. Good for them!

I really liked this movie. And not just because Roselyn Sanchez was all over it. That doesn't hurt, though.

C for Could Have Been Great

...but their aim was off. V for Vendetta has a lot of things going for it, but a lot wrong with it too. I have never read the comic books, so understand that my comments refer only to the movie.

Violence. Vendetta is a violent movie. Violence, of itself, isn't always a bad thing. Sometimes it's necessary. Our very civilization is in part built on the idea that some problems must be solved with violence. The police and military carry weapons for that reason, as do many private citizens. Most of us do not see that as a problem so long as those weapons are not abused. Unfortunately, those who intend to abuse their weapons usually do disagree, which is why the German government disarmed its people years before the extent of their depravity became obvious to everyone. It is also why corrupt politicians still use fear to manipulate their people into willingly surrender their weapons today.

The character of V is violent and brutally so. Somewhere in the course of his sufferings, he lost all normal compunctions against the use of violence to accomplish a goal. He is consumed by his hatred and bitterness. Destruction, sadism, and killing are their fruit. In his defense, I must say that brutality sometimes calls for brutality in return. The film-makers don't appear to intend to promote violence, however much they use it to attract viewers. In that, they are simply catering to a market, giving people what they will pay to see.

Terrorism. Terrorism has been defined as the use of violence to induce fear in order to accomplish a goal. Unfortunately, that's a near meaningless definition. All politics is terrorism by that standard. If you don't want your city taking your house to build a shopping mall, there really isn't anything you can do about it anymore. If you try, then men with guns will stop you. They don't really want to shoot you, and probably won't as long as you are fearful enough to stop short of using your own gun. They are, therefore, terrorists. They use violence or the threat of violence to induce fear and compliance in you.

However, there is a fundamental difference between the "terrorism" of V and the terrorism of Hezbollah. V never once targets children or innocent bystanders. He kills soldiers, thugs, and corrupt politicians, all legitimate war-time targets by almost any standards. Hezbollah, on the other hand, deliberately targets the most innocent and unsuspecting people they can find. Even in the special features, the film-makers continuously refer to V as a terrorist, but they are terribly mistaken.

Religion. Religion is portrayed as the rallying cry of the totalitarian government. As a religious man, that rubs me the wrong way a little. But only a little. It is a fact that religion has very often been used as the excuse of power-seekers to root out and persecute dissenters and to rally support for one cause or another. They seldom actually believe their own lies; religion is only their tool. That seemed to be the case here, too. It would have been nice, however, if one or two of the protaganists had displayed an appreciation for true religion.

Homosexuality. There are so many more deserving groups of people the writers could have chosen to champion. Unlike the movie's violence, it was overwhelmingly obvious that the homosexual content was meant to be promotional. It seemed that at every turn homosexuals were lifted up as a persecuted nobility. The writers condemned the preaching of one kind of morality, while serving up their own, which actually runs counter to what has been held by the majority of people in our own society, and indeed throughout the entire world and all its history.

There is nothing noble about homosexuality or its practitioners. Don't get me wrong. I am certain there are some very good people, even noble people, who also happen to be homosexuals. But it is not what they do in bed that makes them noble, and neither does standing up to torture and death for their right to commit sodomy. That just makes them terribly misguided and a poor heroic focus for a film.

I would love to say that V for Vendetta is a great movie, but it's not. It could have been if they had chosen to elevate a persecuted minority whom I could respect. Fahrenheit 451 is great. V for Vendetta is such a disappointment. In fact, because it promotes behavior that my God says should be punished by death, I cannot even allow it into my house again.