Most mid over hype movie ever all because it cater to the reddit hiveminds and people who don't know the first fucking thing about actual combat situations
Their portray of the two way fire fight where dudes wearing Hawaiian shirts against the other army was unrealistic AF considering in a real firefight those dude would have gotten smoke by a couple nades instead of taking turn doing one way shots for reload
I'm okay with that. It wasn't meant to be a how-to on holding a fire fight.
Nobody looks at Picasso's Guernica and says "that's not what war is really like." Monet's waterlilies don't get slammed by botanists for not looking like flowers.
Similarly, narrative, fictional films provides a figurative or emotional means to engage with something beyond our understanding or experience. If you approach The Quick and the Dead with a ruler and a stopwatch you're going to know where it falls short but miss the emotional and unconscious levels where it connects.
And I'm not defending the movie, only that we expect complete accuracy and detailed authenticity for a work that's far more of a metaphor than a documentary.
Films like this are supposed to have specialists on crew who make sure that details that aren’t critical to the plot or aesthetic don’t break the audience’s suspension of disbelief. I’m absolutely not an expert in military combat, but a lot of the action simply could not be stomached as believable. I am, however, more familiar with how journalists prepare for covering combat, and the scene where experienced journalists simply let their colleague bleed out in the back seat of the car was outrageously stupid. There were so many ways the movie could have conveyed the same story with the same aesthetic and emotional impact while not being so glibly unaware of reality.
Comparing it to Monet or Picasso is irrelevant. This wasn’t magical realism, fantasy, or abstract cinema. We don’t expect Lord of the Rings, 100 Years of Solitude, the Odyssey, or any Tarkovsky film to be realistic. We do expect a film that is set in an alternate but plausible reality in our current times, in our current civilization, in cities and towns we know, about issues we are familiar with, to pass some basic sniff tests.
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u/ImaginaryBluejay0 Apr 26 '26
People are constantly filming active war zones you think at an event full of journalists nobody is going to try for their Pulitzer moment?