So I'm watching the SciFi Channel's Saturday night movie Stir of Echoes 2 : The Homecoming starring Rob Lowe and I must say that this movie really brings a lot of issues to light that I would not expect a movie like this to take on.
So I'm watching the SciFi Channel's Saturday night movie Stir of Echoes 2 : The Homecoming starring Rob Lowe and I must say that this movie really brings a lot of issues to light that I would not expect a movie like this to take on.
From Wikipedia:
Stir of Echoes: The Homecoming is the proposed sequel to 1999's Stir of Echoes. According to Variety, Lionsgate will finance the film which will star Rob Lowe.[1] The film is currently in pre-production and is scheduled to start filming by mid-July 2006 in Toronto. The film will be directed by Ernie Barbaresh,[2] who also wrote the script.[3] The movie is scheduled to be released in 2007.[4] The Variety article states that "the story revolves around a soldier who returns home from a tour of duty in Iraq only to be haunted by visions of the dead."[1] It is implied that the film is a sequel in name only, as the central plot and characters are different from the first film. However, IMDB does list Jake Witzky, the son of Tom from the first movie, as a character. The movie will premiere Saturday, August 11, 2007 on the SciFi Channel.
Now that I got the description of the movie out of the way let's do a little analysis. First Lowe's character Ted Cogan comes home from his tour in the National Guard in Iraq. He's just awoken from a coma, lost some of his buddies from a battle in Iraq, and he's seeing things in a Bruce Willis Sixth Sense sort of way. Of course many believe that he's suffering from PTSD. There's actually a scene in the movie where he tries to get help from what appears to be a hospital or is it a VA hospital? But there is a three month wait to seek mental health help. In reality this ties right into the problem the Iraqi veterans are facing when they come home from doing their tours. Many of them come home to no jobs, no healthcare due to shrinking funding to VA hospitals, and homelessness. Ted Cogan's wife wants to see him back at work ASAP because their bills are piling up, but he's simply not ready.
Of course it did not help that Cogan's unit in Iraq had killed innocent civilians in a major incident that does make the news. In the movie back in the states this gives them the label of being "killers". Now in the real world we do often see the uproar over the killing of innocent Iraqi civilians and rightfully so, though the media does not bring this up a lot. However that's not to say major incidents don't sometimes break through. Just like in Vietnam when the My Lai massacre was brought to light by Seymour Hersh and like with the Abu Gharib and Haditha incidents in Iraq. The American people have a right to know and protest when war crimes happen in their name. Now in the hypothetical situation of this movie we don't know if what Ted's guard unit did was intentional or otherwise. It seems if it's intentional it's a war crime but if it's "collateral damage" then there is less focus given. Of course any killing in war is tragic. War is tragic. There has to be more of an effort by the public to know that national security and homeland security are not the same thing as acts of hegemony.
I would also say that we should not be so quick to put down all the troops who are fighting there because things like this happen. War crime or not, that does not mean we have to put down the rest of the military. There's a scene in the movie when Ted's wife brings up what his unit had did in Iraq and basically blamed him for what happened (again we don't know if it was done intentionally as a war crime or not). In a way this is comparable to the way returning Vietnam vets were looked down upon. It's also interesting that in the movie the three children who have parents lost and injured in Iraq have the view that their parents were sent to Iraq to free the Iraqi people. There's also a scene where Cogan's son tells his dad that he knew that Cogan wasn't over there to win hearts and minds but to make sure that "they" did not attack the US again. So in the movie you actually have a variety of thinking in society about US soldiers in Iraq. In reality I feel extremes is not the answer, most things will fall within what is known as the grey area. Yet, I do think the anti-war movement has been great in getting that distinction of not hating the troops but hating the situation that they were put in by the Bush administration and their war policy right.
Lowe's character keeps on seeing things and only gets some clarity when he goes to see Jake Witzky. From talking with Jake he then realizes the spirit he's been seeing is trying to tell him something. Jake tells Lowe's character Ted Cogan to start listening and doing what it wants otherwise he'll never get peace. Turns out that the spirit really wants justice. This leads Ted Cogan to start listening and following the signs which leads him to find out a gruesome detail about a murder his son, Sammy the daughter of his buddy in his unit who was killed in Iraq, and a third person took part in.
It turns out that after news got home about the fight that Ted Cogan's unit was involved in which killed Sammy's father and left Ted in a coma; the three teenagers were very upset. They went out drinking and headed for their favorite hang out spot. Already there was an Arab-American college student enjoying the scenery. The student was actually stuck and asked the teens for help. The teenagers automatically assume that the college student is not from around here when in reality he's an American citizen. Of course that's not what they want to hear and call him "Osama". They then see that he has a bumper sticker on his car that says "no blood for oil". The girl who lost her Dad in Iraq then says that her Dad did not fight for oil. The student of course did not set out to dedgrade the troops with that statement (i'd imagine the bumper sticker is really a protest of the hegemonic policy of the US and it's policymakers and planners) and tries to communicate that until they then go on to beat and murder the student. In the end Lowe finds out the truth through all his Sixth Sense stuff and goes about setting things right in the Shakespearian tragic type of ending.
It's a decent movie I have to say and it does really bring up some good issues. It makes you think critically and see things from more than one angle. After seeing this I would highly reccomend getting inovlved with VoteVets.org, IAVA, and IVAW.