Osprey
Registered User
- Feb 18, 2005
- 27,909
- 10,774
Eastwood's political stances ring a little transparent in this one. He paints the government investigators as villains trying to bring down a heroic pilot, when in reality they were just doing their job. If they didn't conduct an investigation, they would have been negligent in their duties.
It is sad that his right wing political leanings are increasingly permeating his movies. I still liked it Hanks was solid as usual as was Aaron Eckhart.
If his personal leanings are being reflected in his films, then it's rather tame by Hollywood standards. Hollywood is well known for worse. Perhaps we're just so accustomed to certain villains and messages that we suspect an agenda only when they're different than what we usually get. Perhaps we're just assuming that Eastwood interjects his personal views into his professional work because that's what we've come to expect out of Hollywood.
In my opinion, Eastwood doesn't come anywhere close to using his films to promote personal views like others in Hollywood do. For example, James Cameron's films absolutely drip with his personal views, and he's the lone writer on most of his films. Eastwood, in contrast, doesn't have a single writing credit in his entire career. That doesn't mean that he's had no say in narrative direction, but his films haven't been his stories nearly as much as some might think. I see him as a throwback to the old Hollywood directors who would take a good story (written by someone else) and try to shoot the best film from it as efficiently as possible, before directing became about more than that.
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