When a German general cautions his fellow conspirators in the new film "Valkyrie" that "nothing ever goes according to plan," he was referring to an elaborate plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. But he could just as well have been talking about the spate of Hollywood World War II movies that have invaded multiplexes in recent weeks.
These current films include a wide mix of genres. There's "Valkyrie," the Tom Cruise suspense-thriller; "The Reader" examines notions of complicity and guilt, while "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" and "Good" try to derive further meaning from the Holocaust. Then there's "Defiance," a movie in which the Jews (led by Daniel Craig, no less) fight back. Even love-bug Baz Luhrmann got into the act, ending his epic romance "Australia" with his star-crossed lovers dodging bombs in Darwin dropped by Japanese Zero warplanes.
What these movies share -- and what sets them apart from most of the World War II films we now view as classics -- is their inclination to delve into moral ambiguity. Where prison movies like "Stalag 17" and "The Great Escape" and action films such as "The Guns of Navarone" and "The Train" and even "Saving Private Ryan" were content to let Nazis be Nazis, the new crop of films often prompt moviegoers to ask what they would have done if faced with unspeakable evil.
"Moral complexity is rather overdue in U.S. tellings of World War II," says Nicholas Cull, director of the master's program in public diplomacy at USC. "We need to go beyond the 'Greatest Generation' story that predominated in the 1990s."
Thus far though, the new group of war films has been fighting a losing battle with critics and moviegoers. None of Hollywood's recent efforts, including Spike Lee's much-derided fall release "Miracle at St. Anna," has scored a positive rating on the aggregate website Metacritic. And only "Valkyrie" has made a dent commercially, though "Defiance" has yet to go into wide release.
Not coincidentally, "Valkyrie" has the most in common with the old-school WWII movies. Yes, it too focuses (barely) on the idea of moral compromise and the consequences of inaction when faced with immorality. But mainly (and when it's at its best), it's about a group of high-principled men trying to kill Hitler. And Hitler, of course, is the modern metaphor for evil. Or, as Syracuse professor of media and popular culture Robert Thompson puts it, "Hitler is the Hitler of bad guys."
