[MarchHare]

Originally Posted by Displaced Flames fan

So, Itse, the American government controls all films produced about war? Really? You really believe that?

The US military can indirectly make a huge difference to the content of a film. For both PR and recruitment reasons, the Pentagon is more than willing to freely lend personnel and equipment to a movie shoot, but only if the film portrays the military in a positive light. Since making movies is expensive, and studio execs always want to save money, directors and writers will often be demanded to make changes to the script to ensure the cooperation of the US military. It's not exactly government-mandated censorship, but in Hollywood, money talks.

If you're American and you want to get some impressive combat scenes in your movie, you can call The Pentagon and borrow some of their equipment. Plus any soldiers who happen to be free. To give an example, Black Hawk Down wasn't forced to use out-of-date Hueys because the Pentagon lent them Black Hawks. The 2007 Transformers movie got brand-spanking-new tanks, planes and helicopters (half of which turned out to be villains).

One reason for this is, if the film is positive about the military, it is good Public Relations, and this supports its mission. In fact, if it's really good, e.g. is very positive of the military and a box-office success, it will cause enlistment in the military to increase. Some people said that the Pentagon, in addition to the support it gave for the movie Top Gun, should have been paying them for what amounted to a two-hour recruiting commercial.

There's a catch — the Department of Defense will keep an eye on the script. If they don't like your film, they can yank the co-operation. This was a major reason for the failure of the TV series Supercarrier. Other movies the DoD rejected were Forrest Gump, because the army protagonist was stupid, Mars Attacks!!, because everyone was stupid, and Independence Day. Still, if your film just has to have a full-sized aircraft carrier, where else can one turn?

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...dByThePentagon

Here's a subtle example:

In The Movie of Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears, the carrier that was attacked was originally to have been sunk, but in order to keep military support for the film, the script had to be adjusted so that the carrier survived, though it was mission killed (that is, couldn't do much of anything except limp away).

Is that censorship? It's a grey area for sure, but the filmmakers were forced to change their original vision to ensure military cooperation.