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I need to talk more about Angel Has Fallen, specifically how it comes from this super narrow Establishment Republican point of view and how that’s turned on hard-right political actors.
It’s the movie equivalent of Ted Cruze calling Richard Spencer a loser.
It’s the kind of movie that really hates Dick Cheney, but specifically because he approved PMC contracts instead of instituting a general draft.
It’s Mitt Romney hand-wringing over how Trump is an outlier, a weird accident of the system, and not a direct byproduct of policy and rhetoric.
The weirdest moment in the movie is one where a bunch of PMCs (which is just the modern code for mercenaries) are dead and FBI agents say “we can’t ID any of them, they aren’t in any database” washing the fact that PMCs are overwhelmingly ex-military.
These villains, killing American civilians, police, and politicians, aren’t an American product, but stateless phantoms.
The movie, on the whole, is basically identical to CoD: Advanced Warfare's message of "dying for your country is better than dying for a paycheque" but with even less acknowledgement for the actual pipeline that PMCs get their hardware, training, and funding through.
It's a worldview that has very specific definitions of what is acceptable patriotism and what makes a Real Soldier.
