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Wednesday, August 14, 2024

Land of Bad - Netflix Movie


LAND OF BAD Official Trailer (2024) Russell Crowe
Movie Trailers Source

Three 'operators' and one newbie (Liam Hemsworth) parachute into a Philippines jungle to rescue a CIA 'asset'. Instead of the small group of troublemakers they were expecting to find, they find a whole army of Muslim terrorists. On the other side of world we have Russell Crowe as drone operator 'Reaper' working at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, Nevada.

We get to see high-tech communications at work with our newbie calling in strike coordinates and the drone operators delivering. They also get some help from a couple F-18 fighters and a B1-B bomber. Seems kind of overfill for extracting five guys from the jungle, but it makes for a good show.

The film switches back and forth between intense jungle combat in the Philippines and peaceful suburban life in Las Vegas. I don't always agree (okay, almost never) with America's scattershot approach to foreign policy, but I gotta admire the guys who are out there working on the front lines.

There was an episode of a TV series we watched a while back, The Good Wife maybe, where a female drone operator was convicted in a military court of pressing the fire button in violation of an order. She was likewise operating a drone on the other side of the word from where she sat at the controls safe at home. Some people were killed as a result, but it was never clear, to me at any rate, whether they were bad guys or not. Of course with our flaky leadership, it is unlikely whether anyone else knew either.

The Sulu Sea gets mentioned during the opening of the movie and I think - wait a minute - that sounds familiar. Yes indeed - the minesweeper USS Guardian grounded on a reef in the middle of the Sulu Sea back in 2013. I put up a couple of posts about the incident, here and here. Wikipedia has a page, as does the US Navy.


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