As prep for my forthcoming video on Amazon's Jack Ryan as next-gen propaganda I've been keeping an eye on promotions and events around the launch of season two in November. The first episode was shown at New York Comic-Con a few days ago, and at a panel disc
The epic war drama The Deer Hunter won five Oscars, despite the central conceit and metaphor of the film being inaccurate. This conceit - that the Viet Cong forced American prisoners of war to play Russian Roulette - is the main reason the f
The US military’s attempts to duplicate action movie technology took another leap recently as the Guardian XO robotic exoskeleton wa
One of the most common conspiracy theories you hear in this line of research is that the Pentagon and CIA fund Hollywood movies. This isn't entirely untrue - the CIA covertly funded productions of Animal Farm and 1984 in the early Cold War period - but on the whole, it is untrue. In all the many thousands of documen
The role of the technical advisor is crucial to understanding the military-Hollywood relationship, but very few people know who these people are or what they do. Even less well known is that a significant number of private industry techni
The US Navy SEALs are known as the ‘quiet professionals’, but in recent times they have become the highest-profile of all US special forces.
Captain Phillips tells the story of the 2009 hijacking of the Maersk Alabama - a US container ship - off the coast of Somalia, and the subsequent US Navy intervention that killed three of the pirates and arrested the fourth. It is also one of the least historically accurate films
Walt Disney World Resort’s Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge opens this week - 14 acres of Star Wars experience for those who want to waste their money on plastic replicas of pod racers, Jar Jar Binks masks and hair dye so they can look like Vice Admiral Gender
Lone Survivor is a piece of absolute militaristic schlock, starring the whiny-voiced Marky Mark Wahlberg as Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell - the only survivor of Operation Red Wings, a 2005 special forces joint operation in the summer of 2005. Over 100 pages of Navy documents show their heavy involvement in the film and how they covered 
GI Jane is a crude, clumsy attempt to show a 'woman's perspective' on being in the military, that ruined Demi Moore's career as a leading lady. Little known until now is how the Pentagon negotiated with Ridley Scott to rewrite the script, and even though the film didn't qualify for military support some of the scr
One issue that comes up repeatedly in the script changes enforced by the Pentagon is war crimes, and other violations of the Geneva Conventions. As is so often the case I'm left thinking 'if only the DOD applied the same rules to real life wars as they do to the depiction of wars i
In the second part of our discussion (following Combat Obscura), Henri, Keagan and I talked about the 1989 Oliver Stone classic Born on the 4th of July. Based on the real life experiences of Ron Kovic, we charted the film's development in the late 70s and into the 80
Why isn’t the ‘political film’ a genre of cinema? Hollywood puts out a consistent stream of politically-themed films, but rarely if ever promotes them as such.
I was looking forward to Godzilla: King of the Monsters, having been a fan of giant creature features since I was a young boy. The blend of massive-scale action and affirming our need to respect nature is a winning combination for me. Then I watched it
Sometimes the US military's rewriting of scripts is very specific - take out this joke about the US losing in Vietnam, swap this bottle of beer for an energy drink, remove this scene where soldiers set fire to a village and rape all 
Amazon Prime's The Boys is not only the most enjoyable TV show I've seen all year, it's also the most subversive. While it will appeal to audiences suffering from superhero fatigue after more than a decade of relentless Marvel and DC products, it is so much mo
The US Army's emails on The Long Road Home show that not everything ran smoothly while filming progressed as Fort Hood. While all of the information on script input is redacted, one email contains production notes from the Army's project officer Lt Col.
The teaser trailer for season 2 of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan depict John Krasinski as the eponymous hero in a Latin American country where there is an uprising against the government (coug
The relationship between government liaison offices and the entertainment industry usually works well, resulting in added production value for the industry’s products and the furtherance of the government’s agendas. But sometimes things go wrong.
A story doing the rounds in the last few days claims that the producers of Top Gun: Maverick changed the decals on the back of his leather jacket in order to 'appease Communist Chin
The US military's negotiations on the 1980s Clint Eastwood vehicle Heartbreak Ridge were protracted and complex, resulting in numerous changes before the movie could be approved for Pentagon support. This included changing Clint Eastwood's character from a so
News about this site appears to be spreading - after the flurry of articles citing Spy Culture around the release of Captain Marvel earlier this year, the Washington Business Journal put out a piece on the Top Gun: Maverick trailer using the production assistance agreement I o
For over a decade the CBS action drama NCIS has enjoyed a very close working relationship with the US military, which allows the entertainment liaison offices to review every script, even for episodes where they provide no 
NCIS is a wildly successful TV drama, one of the most popular series of the last 20 years. This week I recount how the DOD, Navy and Marine Corps routinely rewrite episodes of NCIS to fit their PR and propaganda goals.
Tom Cruise dropped into San Diego Comic-Con this week to premiere the trailer for Top Gun: Maverick, which is nothing short of a fan service nostalgia reel and some cheesy dialogue about how Maverick is still - you'v
The Pentagon’s Film Office file on Hear
The in-development film Raven Four-Two tells the story of a battle in 2005 between insurgents and a Kentucky Army National Guard Military Police Unit, during the war in Iraq. Documents released by
The Pentagon recently released the Production Assistance Agreement they signed with the producers of Top Gun: Maverick.
The PRISM Awards are an entertainment industry ceremony that gives out gongs for accurate depictions of substance abuse and mental health problems in films and TV shows. In 2012 the Pentagon were asked to attend and p
Fields of Fire is one of the greatest movies that was never made. A brutal but sympathetic portrait of the Vietnam War, it was denied military support despite being written by a former Secretary of the Navy. This week I examine the story of Fields of Fire using a file from the DOD’s entertainment liaison office.
When James Webb approached the Pentagon to ask for assistance making his Vietnam war drama Fields of Fire he had every right to expect their support. A former Marine and short-term Secretary of the Navy he was a military veteran who had written his novel based on his own real-life experiences of V
Today I received an email that I thought I would share with you, from the publishers of the American Journal of Economics and Sociology. It said that the two articles I penned for the journal were among the top 20 most-downloaded arti
The DOD's directive on working with Hollywood says that they can provide production assistance if it is deemed 'in the best interest of the Nation', but as with all their criteria for deciding whether to give support the
When the producers of Clear and Present Danger approached the Pentagon to ask for military support they probably weren't expecting 6 months of script negotiations to get their film into a shape deemed acceptable by the entertainment liaison offices
1994’s Clear and Present Danger is one of the most important movies in the cinema of the war on drugs, depicting black operations by the CIA and US military against a Colombian drug cartel.
Iran-Contra is in many ways the definitive government conspiracy – involving guns, drugs, anti-communism and black operations, it went all the way to the White House.
1988's The Presidio wanted to film at the real Presidio in San Francisco, an Army installation. As per usual this required a full military script review, but the DOD responded demanding a 'complete rewrite' before they would approve access to
Monster movies are one of the most beloved and distinctive genres in cinema, featuring a winning combination of exotic spectacle, ground-breaking visual effects and reflections on humanity’s relationship with nature.
On this month's subscriber-only podcast I review one of my favourite films of all time - Starship Troop
Chris and Danny invited me back onto their podcast to discuss the 1994 comedy-drama Forrest Gump. We talked about the original book by Winston Groom as well as McNamara's 100,000 - a project to recruit troops into the US Army who would normally have fallen below the required standards. We ho
The 2005 biographical war film Jarhead is one of a very small number of films set in the first Gulf War. Despite being based on the autobiography of a Marine who served in Desert Storm the DOD refused to provide it with military support. 
The Superman reboot Man of Steel launched the (now abandoned) DC Extended Universe, and put a much darker tinge on the Superman franchise than any previous incarnation, especially the Christopher Reeve classics. Man of Steel benefited from large-scale support from the military, but hidden until now are the d
In 1977 the producers of Superman and Superman II approached the Pentagon to try to obtain stock footage of missiles launching, for use in depicting Lex Luthor's dastardly plot to nuke the San Andreas fault. The Air Force and Strategic Air Command were provided
Deep Impact is one of a pair of twin films released in 1998 that were based around a giant meteor colliding with earth. The film and its twin, the more successful Armageddon, were both supported by NASA and the Department of Defense.
While it is now considered a Cold War classic Ice Station Zebra was a flop when it was first released.