Okay, less frivolous than usual, but I want to talk about it, so there. When I heard there was going to be a movie about Lincoln by Spielberg, I got hopeful. Spielberg was the kind of guy who could move movie mountains, who could get a studio to waste a ton of money on a likely financial loser in the name of art, and give us a high quality historic epic...
...assuming he didn’t miss the point. Which is a real problem with him. The history geek in me absolutely loves the opening scene in Saving Private Ryan for its startlingly realistic depiction of D-Day, warts and all.
And part of me hated the movie’s “Vietnamization” of the war. I once heard Spielberg say that he believed that all great war movies are anti-war movies. Well, of course every person should be reluctant to fight a war; the default position, the presumption for every civilized person should be to prefer peace to war unless a moral justification for the war is presented. And if that is all he means—that a great war movie should make us hesitant to go to war—that is fine.
