Mission Unaccomplished: American War Films in the Twenty-First Century

An analysis of how post-9/11 war movies changed from following soldiers on specific missions to chronicling war as a day-to-day occupation.

In 2003, the United States began a war in Iraq without a mission. Instead of fighting to restore peace—the traditional objective of warfare—servicemembers faced the grim reality that there was no goal. Lacking even certainty as to who was the enemy, soldiers discovered that their task was simply to survive.

Mission Unaccomplished explores how Hollywood grasped the experience of Iraq from the perspective of US soldiers, reinventing the war film in the process. Historically, films such as Saving Private Ryan valorized the goals of war by chronicling missions that unambiguously contribute to the defeat of the enemy and the restoration of peace. But in The Hurt Locker, American Sniper, Green Zone, and other recent dramas, soldiers just try to outlast the chaos. Dramatizing the aimlessness of the war, events occur in random order, and soldiers have no sense of how their actions contribute to victory or peace. Looking to recent WWII movies such as Dunkirk and Hacksaw Ridge, which use this same cinematic vocabulary to position soldiering as merely a deadly job to be endured, Alan Nadel argues that the disillusionment of Iraq has influenced cinema broadly, inspiring a newly critical war film genre.

Alan Nadel is a professor of American literature and culture at the University of Kentucky and the author of seven books, including Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age and Demographic Angst: Cultural Narratives and American Films of the 1950s.