Cartoon conflict

It's wartime in America. It has been for a decade, but as critics have pointed out, you wouldn't know it at the multiplex.

Films about the war on terror have been few and far between. Audiences didn't exactly flock to theaters for World Trade Center (2006), Rendition (2007), Green Zone (2010) or Fair Game (2011).

Our leaders told us to mobilize and make sacrifices during WWII, and Hollywood inspired us with exciting, patriotic, propaganda-rich pics such as Destination Tokyo (1943), A Guy Named Joe (1943), and even 1942's Casablanca.

Today's politicians seem to prefer the war to be as unobtrusive as possible. (A lesson learned from Vietnam, which was all too visible on the nightly news.)

For the most part, Hollywood has followed suit.

But that doesn't mean that hawkish propaganda films no longer exist.

They've just undergone a cartoonish, sci-fi makeover.

Instead of Raoul Walsh's 1945 Objective, Burma!, we have Transformers: Dark of the Moon; Battle: Los Angeles; Skyline; and Falling Skies.

American viewers increasingly see war depicted only in fantasy-soaked films that often glorify violence in the name of a crude, blind form of jingoism.

Consider the box office returns.

Kathryn Bigelow's 2009 Oscar winner The Hurt Locker, perhaps the most high-profile film about the Iraq war, had a total domestic gross of $17 mil after five months in theaters.

Compare that to Michael Bay's third Transformers epic, which has cleared $305 mil in just three weeks.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon is about an all-out, take-no-prisoners war waged by goody-two-shoes alien robots, the Autobots ("who fought for freedom," says the voice-over), and their U.S. military allies. Their opponents are the Decepticons, bad alien 'bots "who dreamed of tyranny."

The enemy in the alien invasion pics Battle: Los Angeles and Skyline and the TV series V and Falling Skies aren't hunks of talking metal, but seriously gross-looking, insectoid (or reptilian) creatures dripping goo. They don't bother communicating with us, much less explaining their motives: Their only goal is to wipe us out or enslave us.

There are unmistakable echoes of the Sept. 11 attacks and our subsequent conflicts.

In crude reiterations of the attacks on the World Trade Center, the aliens reduce entire cityscapes to ash and rubble - Boston in Falling Skies, Chicago in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Los Angeles in Skyline and Battle: Los Angeles.  

To a certain extent, Transformers and its ilk provide an outlet for our understandable post-Sept. 11 rage.

Most serious war films today muddy the waters - either by showing the horrors our soldiers must face, as in The Hurt Locker and the HBO mini-series Generation Kill, or by calling into question the war on terror itself, as in Redacted and Fair Game.

The sci-fi films offer certainty.

The human freedom fighters in this summer's TNT mini-series Falling Skies don't have any points of law or philosophy to consider: Their war is just, their enemy revolting. Doubt need not cloud their judgment.

It's hard to mistake the enemy when it is more alien, more inscrutable than any radical Islamist jihadist could possibly be.

It's also easier to obliterate an enemy that has no face, no eyes, than to confront the fact that real soldiers are asked to kill fellow human beings - no matter how vile their ideology.

In a particularly disturbing scene in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the otherwise avuncular Autobot leader Optimus Prime vows, "We'll kill them all" in response to the Decepticons' um, deceptive ways. It's genocide they're after. (Or is it 'boticide?)

There's the rub.

Do we want to avoid ugly truths about the real cost of war? Even the most jingoistic classical war films were upfront about the death and deprivation we faced during war.

What makes the new wave of sci-fi war films especially troubling is that they also sell a puerile form of super-hero-sized triumphalism more fabulous than any children's fable: The good guy, the hero, always - always - triumphs.

We know that stars Aaron Eckhart and Michelle Rodriguez will survive the war in Battle: Los Angeles; we know that every one of our Transformers heroes, including Shia LaBeouf, Josh Duhamel, and Tyrese Gibson, will walk away unharmed.

It's crazy, if potent, propaganda we're being sold by these movies: That war is as bloodless as a video game.

The pop culture industry seems unwilling to explore war except through fantasy.

Politicians trade in fairy-tale rhetoric about how our enemy hates our freedoms and is "Wanted: Dead or Alive."

And, as box office receipts show, we lap it up.

But let's not forget to emerge into the light of day once in a while.