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‘Act of Valor’ with real-life SEALs: new breed of war movie or propaganda?

By Ann Hornaday,February 24, 2012

In a scene that could have jumped out of a Michael Bay movie — or, in the Obama era of surgical warfare, a video monitor in the White House Situation Room — a team of U.S. Navy SEALs boards a sleek yacht, populated with bikini-clad women, to track down and interrogate a dangerous international smuggler.

The sequence is indeed from a movie: the new release “Act of Valor.” But the SEALs are real-life active-duty operators (the babes and the bad guy are actors), and the episode is an authentic training maneuver, although the yacht was provided by the film’s producers. That mix of fiction and realism is just what the filmmakers hope will draw audiences to “Act of Valor” this weekend, when it arrives in 3,000 theaters throughout the country.

But the surprising, if not unprecedented, use of so many active-duty military personnel, as well as the filmmakers’ embedded access to training missions and material (including a nuclear submarine) have put “Act of Valor” in the crosshairs of critics who question whether the movie crosses the line between entertainment and propaganda, and whether the military should be in the movie business at all. The relationship between the Pentagon and Hollywood has raised eyebrows before, even prompting an occasional congressional investigation.

That relationship — sometimes cozy, sometimes contentious — has existed from the days of silent cinema, when the 1927 movie “Wings” received assistance in staging aerial dogfights, through 1986, when the Navy set up recruitment booths in theaters showing “Top Gun,” until last summer, when the Army ran an ad campaign to coincide with the release of “X-Men: First Class.” (For its part, “Act of Valor” was heavily promoted during this year’s Super Bowl.) Every service branch of the armed forces has its own film office, staffed by active-duty officers, whose job is to work with Hollywood, review scripts and provide support in terms of military hardware, advice and, sometimes, people.

“The Pentagon has what Hollywood wants, which is ships and planes and helicopters and personnel,” says author David L. Robb, who in “Operation Hollywood” chronicled the connections between the Pentagon and the movie industry. “And Hollywood has what the Pentagon wants, which is eyeballs. It’s product placement.”

“Act of Valor” began germinating more than four years ago, when stuntmen-turned-documentary-makers Scott Waugh and Mike “Mouse” McCoy made a seven-minute film about the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Combatant-Craft Crewmen, whose responsibilities include inserting and extracting Navy SEALs, the elite operations force responsible for killing Osama bin Laden and rescuing two aid workers in Somalia last month.

By the time Waugh and McCoy finished their documentary, the Navy had embarked on its own feature-film mission, inviting proposals for projects that would depict the SEALs in a more realistic — and favorable — light than in such bombastic fiction features as “Navy Seals” (starring Charlie Sheen) and “G.I. Jane” (starring Demi Moore).

A Quadrennial Defense Review released in 2006 had indicated that the Navy needed 500 more SEALs in order to to meet projected demands, explained Rear Adm. Dennis Moynihan, the Navy’s chief spokesman. “There was a series of initiatives we launched to try to increase the number of SEALs we have in the Navy,” he said. “This film project was one of those initiatives.”

He added that the Navy sought a film that would educate as well as entertain. “We wish we could take the American people and fly them out to aircraft carriers and destroyers and submarines, so they could see what their Navy does on a daily basis,” he said. “We can’t get them out to our ships every weekend, but we know they go to the movies every weekend.”

McCoy and Waugh’s proposal was accepted, and after spending time at SEAL headquarters in San Diego, they floated the idea of using the real men themselves. “Once we were inside, we were just blown away,” McCoy said earlier this month, just hours before he, Waugh and a group of SEALs were to screen “Act of Valor” at the White House. “That’s when the genesis [of the idea] happened, when we connected with the men and saw this brotherhood and this depth of character amongst men, and the sacrifices they’ve been through in the last 10 years in sustained combat.”

The fictionalized story of “Act of Valor” centers around an eight-man SEAL team, and two operators in particular: a 38-year-old lieutenant commander named Rorke and his buddy and subordinate, Chief Dave. When the men are sent to rescue a U.S. intelligence operative in Central America, their mission expands to entail weapons smuggling and international terrorism, culminating in a dramatic shootout on the U.S.-Mexico border. (The story also ranges from the Philippines and Chechnya to Somalia.)