![]() Much of this is seen through helmet-cams, night-vision goggles, spy-surveillance cameras and the baleful aerial gaze of satellites (the menacing thrum of chopper-blades remains a constant).įor Seal Team 6, though, the dominant influence seems to be Showtime's Homeland, with Robertson playing the Carrie Mathieson role as Vivian Hollands, the determined analyst who makes the first smart guess about the house in Abbottabad and puts it under surveillance ("one very tall bearded man, not busy – we call him 'the Pacer' – 12-foot-high walls, 12-13 guards, no phone or internet, all trash burned on-site, all children home-schooled …"). Like everything from FX's short-lived Over There TV series to Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, Seal Team 6 flaunts a narrow palette of sandy, dusty landscapes, camouflage colouring, darkened briefing rooms and barracks, sun-baked Afghan ravines, teeming souks. The movie demonstrates that we now have a firm, widely agreed-upon visual aesthetic for the Iraq-Afghanistan campaign movies, one distinct from the emerald-green rice paddies and triple-canopy jungles of the Vietnam war film. It provides a fairly clear, certainly a very exciting depiction of the raid as it went down, while bolstering the shoot-em-up material with fictionalised backstories for the Seals themselves (the real Team 6 will remain anonymous for life). Forget all that context, however, and you find here a pretty niftily put together platoon-movie, tautly directed by John Stockwell ( Blue Crush, Crazy/Beautiful), well cast with familiar second-string TV faces (Boss's Kathleen Robertson, Six Feet Under's Freddy Rodriguez et al, plus the gaunt and reliable William Fichtner). Seal Team 6 could only rate as propaganda in a toxic, Fox News-driven political environment such as obtains at this moment. The Democratic activist in Weinstein, meanwhile, was surely horrified when Columbia delayed the Bigelow picture until after the presidential election, and was damned if his version wasn't going to make some sort of splash before that date. On the one hand, Weinstein is working an old grindhouse promotional gambit: riding the publicity coattails of a more prestigious and expensive feature of similar theme or provenance – in this case Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty – and attempting to reach the screens before it, the better to dine, vampirishly, on a percentage of the profits. T his film is the point at which Harvey Weinstein, exploitation-movie impresario extraordinaire, meets Harvey Weinstein, Democratic big-money donor and activist.
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