Great War on Terror Films that Never Were

Does anyone remember that remarkable scene in Rambo IV: Holy War when Stallone, as the aging John Rambo, caught up with Bin Laden and engaged him in a brutal knife fight? Remember the line just before Rambo shoves his blade into Bin Laden's brisket? "Say hi to the seventy two virgins!"

I should be surprised if you did, since that movie never got made. It's true that in the wake of 9/11 Sylvester Stallone shopped around an idea for Rambo IV in which his signature character goes on the hunt in the wilds of Afghanistan for the perpetrator of the worse terror attack in history. But Hollywood wasn't interested. At last glance, John Rambo is going to go after Burmese pirates. Nasty folks, I'm sure, well worthy of Rambo's particular form of peace making. But kind of obscure compared to Islamo Fascists.

How about that great scene in the epic film Mazar il Sharrif when the Delta Force guys, mounted on horse back, engaged a Taliban position in a cavalry charge that was right out of John Ford? Sorry, but that film, once a James Cromwell project, also never got made.

Or how but those scene of intense house to house fighting as the Marines battled terrorists in that Harrison Ford flick, No True Glory? It's in, last we checked, what Hollywood calls development hell. That means that it's not likely to get made.

It's amazing. The smoke had barely cleared above the wreckage of the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, almost sixty six years ago, when Hollywood at that time had started cranking out movies depicting heroic Americans slaughtering droves of Axis villains. Most the those films were horrible and don't really stand up, even though we still agree that the Nazis and the Japanese were evil and we were good. A few, like Casablanca, will live forever.

Hollywood has done a handful of good films about 9/11. The Showtime TV film, DC:9/11, United 93, and the Oliver Stone project, World Trade Center. But for the most part, Tinseltown has been AWOL in the War on Terror.

It's not just that people are upset about the War in Iraq, which strictly speaking is a theater of operations in the broader War on Terror. We haven't even gotten anything from Afghanistan, which is supposed to be the "good war" as opposed to the Iraq "bad war." (Mind, I think people are spinning some of the polls about Iraq. Worded differently, other polls suggest a desire to win before pulling out, but that's a subject for another time.)

Part of the reason may be that Hollywood is nervous about depicting Muslims as bad guys. It's a little inconvenient truth that the folks that committed 9/11 were not blond haired, Eurotrash NeoNazis that seem to substitute for Islamo Fascists in a lot of current films and TV shows. Somehow it's considered racist if ones heavies are dark skinned, speak funny, and pray toward Mecca. Only, that is what the Islamo Fascists are.

Of course one can get good stories out of the War on Terror, including soldier produced "home movies" on the Military Channel. But it's not really the same as a big budget, big screen epic.

So what do you say, Spielberg? How about it Ridley Scott? You guys in Hollywood are always talking about how you want to push the envelope, go past the edge. Looks like a War on Terror film in which the Americans are the good guys and the terrorists are the bad guys would fit that bill. How would have thought it?