Comment on True Lies: Arnold Schwarzenegger's Last Great Action Blockbuster

• 4am@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Why, because of the “arab terrorist” trope? I mean? A bit I suppose but also it’s not like groups like that haven’t existed in the past/exist today. I don’t recall them getting into the backstory of “Crimson Jihad” at all but given American interventionism has, IRL bread the distain of Western hegemony; you could look at it as an inevitability that they’d exist and a warning as to what might happen to America (and kinda did, on 9/11). That clearly isn’t the movie’s intent though, but I can see how “Arab terror groups exist and do not like America” could become a plot; and like any action flick they do not do any sympathizing with the designated bad guys.

  They do kinda cartoonishly kill the leader at the end though, in a very “America good, delight in this malcontent’s ultimate failure, the west always wins, hoorah” kind of way; but this is also a mid-90s action flick from a time before most of us had a way to see through all the “the rest of the world is desolate and savage” narratives spun by the CIA and the state department and rung though our elected officials. So, it’s not exactly gonna be woke.

  It’s a great movie but it’s also definitely a self-report on the state of the American zeitgeist at the time, yeah.

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  • Reverendender@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yeah, the middle eastern/arab/persian terrorists are repeatedly portrayed as bumbling idiots, which is I think what I am getting at, vs. them simply being the antagonists.

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    • best_username_ever@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It was based on a French movie, and at the time we both had our fair share of islamic terrorism way before Bin Laden, so it was obvious that terrorists would be islamists.

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    • nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Most terrorists of any type are idiots. It’s why the TSA can be a completely joke and planes generally don’t get hijacked or blown up .

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    • Crashumbc@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I mean everything in the movie is given a silly spin.

      Half the things Arnie and the “good guys” are bumbling also, they just come out ahead because they’re the good guys …

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    • Zipitydew@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Kinda yeah but kinda no. In that it’s meant to be a funny action movie that wasn’t taking itself seriously.

      And that there are bros like this in those groups. reddit.com/…/somewhere_in_afghanistan_abu_hajaar_…

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