12 Strong Goes to The Front Lines of Forgettable Cinema

It's January, so the massive box office success of both Lone Survivor and American Sniper dictates it's time for another action war movie based on a real-life incident that occurred to U.S. armed forces (or mercenaries in the case of 13 Hours) in the Iraq War. 2018's entry in this subgenre is 12 Strong (the trailers add the sentence The Declassified True Story of the Horse Soldiers to the title), which is all about a group of U.S. soldiers called Task Force Dagger that's led by Captain Mitch Nelson (Chris Hemsworth). Nelson, whose only led the team in training situations, has recently taken a desk job that'll allow him to spend more time with his wife and young kid but those plans take a turn once the World Trade Center attacks occur.

Steven Spielberg's Second World War II Movie Of The 1990's Was The Excellent Saving Private Ryan

I'm pretty sure this will make me sound like some sort of Steven Spielberg shill or something (who would be giving me dollars for positive reviews in that case like how Marvel apparently sends check to Marvel shills? Amblin? Am I an Amblin shill?), but it's impressive how many of his movies have been able to cement themselves as the de facto pop culture touchstones for various parts of history and/or our world as a whole. Jaws is the cornerstone of how we all perceive sharks, E.T. is thought of as the standard-bearer for friendly depictions of otherworldly visitors while his historical films very much feel like the most famous depictions of massively important historical events like the Holocaust or Abraham Lincoln's presidency.