China’s latest box office hit has been called propaganda but the Pentagon has been using Hollywood for a century, writes Tom Pattinson
The Wandering Earth – a big-budget sci-fi thriller that tells the tale of a future planet earth saved by a China-led rescue team – earned a whopping £500 million at the Chinese box office over the New Year holidays. Based on a Liu Cixin story, the film has gone down very well with the authorities. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying, recommended everyone watch it and state-run papers have universally been singing its praises.
The film shows China unifying the world and leading other countries to ultimately save the earth. But international critics have panned the film – not because of its one-dimensional actors and soppy script but because it “appears to have injected a dose of President Xi Jinping’s political theory into the plot,” says The Economist.
“As China becomes the de facto leader of the United Earth, other countries must fulfil their roles as deserters, cowards, and fools,” wrote Chelsea Chung in Supchina.
Reviewers seemed to be surprised that a Chinese-made film has political undertones and pro-China bias. The 2015 film Wolf Warrior, currently the highest-grossing Chinese film – also garnered headlines, accusing it of being a recruitment tool for the People’ Liberation Army. But it’s a tactic taken straight out of the Hollywood playbook.
Is Wolf Warrior a recruitment tool for the People’ Liberation Army?
Back in 1986, a Hollywood film called Top Gun featured an unknown actor called Tom Cruise training to become a fighter pilot at naval aviation school. Following its release, there was a 400 percent spike in fighter pilot applications in America. Likewise, the 1991 film Silence of the Lambs also saw a spike in female recruits to the CIA. Both these films were made with direct support from the Department of Defence (DOD).
The US government has worked behind the scenes on over 800 major movies and more than 1,000 TV shows
More recently, the film 2012 film Act of Valour was a Hollywood production, funded by the US military, that told the story of the rescue of a captured CIA officer. Actual Navy Seals were used instead of actors (and boy that showed) and was essentially a 111-minute-long advert for the army.
This is by no means a new phenomenon. Back in 1929, the very first Best Picture Oscar was awarded to the film Wings. It was funded by the Pentagon. In 1950 the CIA bought the rights to George Orwell’s Animal Farm and then funded the 1954 British animated version of the film. Written in 1945, Animal Farm was a non-too-subtle criticism of Stalin’s Soviet Russia.
Tom Secker and Matthew Alford, authors of a book on government influence in Hollywood, trawled through thousands of pages of formerly classified archive documents to discover that the US government has worked behind the scenes on over 800 major movies and more than 1,000 TV shows. And the man responsible for much of that is Phil Strub, the Department of Defence’s chief Hollywood liaison. Strub has been editing scripts, altering plot lines and changing history since the early 1990s.
Top Gun – the ultimate recruitment movie
It’s an obvious ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ relationship between the Pentagon and Hollywood. The 2002 Jack Ryan film, Sum of all Fears, got the use of two B-2 bombers, two F-16 fighter jets, a National Airborne Operations Centre, three Marine Corps CH-53E helicopters, a UH-60 Army helicopter, four ground vehicles, 50 Marines, and an aircraft carrier – all for a meagre million dollars. Dozens of other ‘Pentagon-positive’ films have received equipment and expertise in exchange for a re-working of the script and often re-working of actual history as Zero Dark Thirty and Black Hawk Down both did by removing embarrassing details about characters involved in the films.
But less obvious movies including Meet the Parents, Iron Man and the Transformers series are also on the list of films censored or modified by the Pentagon. Strub was responsible for adding the line “Bring ‘em home,” about US troops attacked by alien Decepticons, to create an image of parental care by the US military, and his fall out with Iron Man director John Favreau has gone down in Hollywood legend.
So for those who claim The Wandering Earth is merely a propaganda showpiece, it might be worth remembering that the same argument can be made of Apollo 13, Armageddon and Deep Impact – all Hollywood blockbusters with Mr Strub’s red ink all over them.
