We Three Kings

I know I shouldn’t start a blog this way (or the way I just did), but I have been trying to figure out what to say about David Russell’s Three Kings (1999). I saw the movie when it came out, and I remember liking it back then, but it takes on an eerie prescience now that there is another “gulf war” and another "invasion" of Iraq.

The soldiers keep wondering what they’re doing in Iraq, but they definitely support their own mission to free Kuwait. It’s a worthy goal, perhaps. But the people of Iraq want the Americans to finish the job and support their own rebellion against Saddam. Bush told them to rise up against him, but then he left and wouldn’t pursue the dictator. Now, seven years after the movie, American soldiers are attempting to do what everyone felt like they should have done back then: remove Saddam.

But what has happened in the meantime? If we take this movie as the truth (which it isn’t), then the people of Iraq wanted Saddam gone. Everyone except the people in power wanted Saddam gone, and many of the soldiers didn’t want to be in his army, anyway. But now that the US has actually removed Saddam, it seems that everyone has turned against the Americans. They thought we (at the peril of including everyone in the US military) were evil then because we abandoned them, and they think we’re evil now because we didn’t. Perhaps it’s really all because we abandoned them? What has happened to make us invade NOW rather than twelve years earlier?

The only answer is 9/11.

But that’s an incomplete answer, isn’t it? A bit of a ruse, perhaps? Saddam was NOT connected to 9/11 no matter what percentage of the population thinks he was. So the question becomes unanswerable—there is no reason to invade now rather than back then, and the soldiers still don’t know what they’re doing there. Whereas they were freeing Kuwait back then, they think they’re freeing Iraq now. The difference is that Iraq doesn’t seem to want to be freed.

Yes, I have descended into a diatribe, although I didn’t want to. But I guess that’s the power of a movie like Three Kings. I intended to write about how the style of the film competed with it’s serious and often gut-wrenching story, but all of that is overshadowed by the very plot of a war in Iraq. Is it even possible to talk about a movie about the 1991 Gulf War without discussing the present war? I guess it is, but I can’t seem to do it.

Maybe next time I will tell you why Three Kings doesn’t deserve an A. Or maybe I will continue with why this film depresses me…

Grade for Three Kings: 8