In a project that sounds alternately fascinating and disappointing, and certainly is proof that we’ve looped around a bit from the pro-soldier anti-war flicks of the first decade of our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, Tom Hardy is going to play a Vietnam veteran who, disillusioned by anti-war sentiment on his return home, reacts by joining a violent motorcycle gang. I find this thing sort of irritating because it feeds the persistent, and false, narrative that opposing sending young men into situations where they can be killed, maimed, and traumatized somehow means not being supportive of those men and their interests. But it’s also kind of too bad because one of my favorite, deeply weird movies about Vietnam deploys bikers to precisely the opposite effect.
I discovered The Losers a couple of years ago while writing a piece comparing Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan movies. The plot of the movie is essentially as follows: a group of violent bikers get dropped into Vietnam to do a covert mission the military apparently can’t, in its official capacity, carry out. They soup up their bikes with ridiculous killing machinery, wreck dive bars in Saigon, plot to get their Vietnamese girlfriends home, and behave with honor after serving time for rape. Eventually, they’re sold out and killed by the C.I.A. after they succeed in rescuing a captured officer in Cambodia—it turns out, they were meant to fail, and their failure was supposed to be a pretext for expanding the war into yet another country.
The movie’s a total mess, but it’s entirely comfortable with the idea that you can separate out the government’s interests from the interests of the men in its service. It’s unfortunate that it takes a B movie to embrace what should be an obvious principal, and one that, if it was championed by slicker, more high-profile movies wouldn’t be so easy to marginalize.
I do think that J. Michael Straczynski is basically correct that, given the nature of storytelling in comics, that “the perception that these characters shouldn’t be touched by anyone other than Alan is both absolutely understandable and deeply flawed…Superman is the greatest comics character ever created. But I don’t hear Alan or anyone else suggesting that no one other than Shuster and Siegel should have been allowed to write Superman.” And given the buzz about a Watchmen prequel movie, some prequel comics were probably inevitable. Given both of those things, and that I’m essentially reconciled to the idea that we’re going to have more of these stories that I see as essentially finished, I think the real problem with this project is that it’s focusing on the earlier lives of the characters we came to know in the initial story arc.
I recently read David Michaelis’s Schulz and Peanuts, which is a kind of depressing, if enlightening enterprise. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised than the man who created Charlie Brown was chronically depressed, but the story of his infidelities, and in particular, the way he pressured his oldest daughter to get an abortion in Japan and then barely acknowledged what he’d done when she got back, is less than gratifying. 


