I'll admit, back in fall '01, I had the cynical thought that in ten years' time or so, we'll be seeing some couple like Leonardo Dicaprio and Kate Winslett running up and down the Twin Towers as they burned, with Celine Dion music playing...

A more significant question than "When will they start making movies about the Iraq war," I think, would be "When will they start making good movies about the Iraq war?"

There are a lot of wars that almost never get a good movie. Look at WWI--there's about 3 of them.

World War One... the forgotten war. Pity it.

Strictly speaking, no. The Special Forces were created back in 1947; when someone in the Pentagon considered how much damage some of the Allied troops overrun by the Japanese did hiding out behind enemy lines, providing organization/communications to local anti-Japanese resistance. So they decided to create and train a unit to do just that on purpose; let themselves be overrun by the Red Army in Europe, and organize the resistance from behind.

What was relatively new was their public status; JFK talked them up, which led to a massive expansion of the program (almost ruining it in the process) and turned them into something of a media darling for the Pentagon. This movie, and the publicity given to Barry Saddler's little ditty, were the attempt to exploit all that.

Ok; so military history is one of my things. Back to the movies.

It's not Americas Army.

I did a google search on this and nothing much came up. Just the right and left wing propaganda movies. So no major movies in the works... yet.

Don't be silly. One of the most famous war movies there is is based on WWI, about twelve years after the fact. Unless you've never heard of All Quiet on the Western Front?

(Yes, it's based on a novel. But so was Godfather.)

Caffeine's right. There's a game online, i saw it on the news a few days ago, that automatically updates it's scenarios every 3 weeks or so with REAL LIFE missions that the soldiers in Iraq faced. They use Satelites and cameras to accurately recreate real life missions. For instance, I heard this month's mission is the assault on Kabul. There's also missions to capture, or kill, the Hussein boys. I remember the shot from the game of thte player climbing into a humvee and firing a TOW missile into the window of hussein's hideout.

And Were, I bow to your knowledge on the Special Forces. SF was never one of my strong points of military history.

If you're willing to step into TV series, don't forget Black Adder, or Young Indiana Jones. The best (and bleakest) YIJ episodes were about WWI.

And if you're willing to step back into the arts as a more general field, there's Wilfred Owen, and Benjamin Britten's setting of his poetry, the War Requiem. Practically all of the 'art' art (as opposed to movies or TV) I can think of about WWII is Holocaust-related. And Guernica, if you count the Spanish Civil War as a WWII-warmup.

I have nothing against movies based on novels (or anything else); a large number of the best movies ever made were adaptations.

More to the point, what I said about WWI was generated by a discussion with an English teacher friend of mine who wanted to show his students a good film about that war to go with their unit on All Quiet On The Western Front. His problem was that he didn't want to just show them an adaptation that wasn't good (like the newer version) but they wouldn't go for the old, great, black and white version.
And from there his problem became that there were very few good WWI films out there (one he mentioned was a Mel Gibson one, I forget the title).

And so when I said there were about 3 good WWI movies, I was talking about the two I knew (All Quiet on the Western Front and the Gibson one--Gallipolli, that's it!), leaving open the third slot because I'm sure there's one out there I haven't heard of.
But I stand by my original point, which is that WWI has had very few good movies based upon it.

There's a pretty fair WW I movie called Hell's Angels (1930); it's about the air war over the western front.

The problem with movie making and WW I is that it was visually nasty for those in it, and all of the battlefield successes that might merit a `heroic' movie were Central Powers or Russian successes. It's tough to make a movie showing what clever and brave folks the other side were; and no one had ever heard of the Russian victories (besides the political problems talking up Russia would raise).

There are movies about the Russian Revolution, and they touch on WWI. Also, instead of focusing on the trenches, you could write about the one-on-one combat that happened in the skies. I don't know if anyone's done a movie with that, but Charles Schulz didn't stay away from it.

Lots of movies *touch* on WW I; just off the top of my head there's Blue Max, The Great Dictator, This Is The Army, Dr Zhivago, Things to Come, The Pit and the Pendulum (the Boris Karloff and Belo Lugosi version); there's a whole host of others. I figured we were holding this to movies about WW I itself.

For a recent, absolutely beautiful, and extraordinarily gruesome look at WWI trench warfare, see "The Very Long Engagement." But this is more of a movie that touches on WWI rather than a movie about WWI.

I dunno, so far as I can tell, the makers of Enemy at the Gates seem to have done well discussing Russian victories, though that was WWII, of course. And it wasn't that bad a movie to boot. I'm not sure Russia is that big of a political hotspot anymore, movie-wise anyway.

Note that Enemy at the Gates was made post-cold-war.