And something always felt a little off about it. It's a great movie with a lot of great scenes, but there's a woke element that just doesn't make sense, and makes the rest of the movie harder to buy into. Making Emily Blunt's character a FBI Hostage Rescue Team leader more or less breaks her character arc.
The first scene of the movie shows her leading an FBI tactical team on a raid against a drug house where she is involved in a firefight and kills a guy. In wokeness, this would be done to set her up as a girlboss who is never wrong, is always tough as nails, never gets overwhelmed, etc. But the rest of the movie shows her as a meek and timid woman out of her depth, getting shown up by men constantly, getting overpowered and totally at the mercy of a stronger man multiple times, and has her have an emotional breakdown at the end where she can't wrap her head around the situations she was just in.
That version of her character is actually more true to life, and a woman would get her ass kicked by men every time, would have an emotional breakdown, and would be out of her depth in every one of those situations. But the movie still tried to portray her as some tactical badass for like the first 10 minutes. It would have made more sense to make her some FBI financial crimes office worker type who was brought on as an advisor because of the whole money tracking plot point.
The movie wants to set her up as a badass, but then spends the rest of the time undercutting it. Those two things just can't really exist in the same character. If she really was competent enough to climb the ladder of the SWAT pipe hitting community to be a part of FBI HRT as a leader, she just shouldn't be such a meek pushover and basket case the rest of the movie. Granted a small woman like her actually doing that is laughably unrealistic, but if you're going to write the character to be that, it just doesn't make sense to turn around and have her not be that for the other 95% of the film.
I suspect perhaps in an earlier draft of the film, her character maybe was written to be some office working investigative type who was painfully naive about life threatening situations, but someone probably put a stop to that because it wouldn't be empowering enough, so they changed her into being some SWAT team hardass...only to have none of that characterization actually count for the rest of the movie.
I'd say it's more saying your a tactical genius against one enemy but a complete novice against another.
It's like how in a conventional fight, America can be supreme as just look at the Gulf war. But against an insurgency like in Vietnam they really struggled and it was only late into the war when it was too late they adapted with groups like MACV-SOC.
It's like Aliens, you had these badasses the space marines with big guns and bravado and...they get their asses kicked by xenomorphs because they used the wrong tactics against them.
One thing to keep in mind with Vietnam is that after Tet, the Viet Cong as an organization was dead, most of its members were killed. After Tet, almost all units encountered were regular NVA.
At the tactical and the strategic level, the Tet Offensive was an unmitigated disaster for the VC, and they never recovered.
Of course, this didn't stop Walter Cronkite from saying the war was lost, back stabbing commie that he was.
It wasn't JUST Cronkite, the draft bringing in UNWILLING soldiers combined with orders that simply wasted lives (wasted lives taking a hill, only to abandon it the next day then have to retake it the next week) meant moral was EXTREMELY low in the army. The Tet offensive, on every other level was a failure, broke the final straws as how could they trust their command saying they were 'winning' when with ALL their intelligence agencies they let it happen in the first place.
Not only did you have the infamous 'fragging' but near the end you had squads refuse orders to attack points and officers too scared of their own troops in case THEY get fragged to force them to or report it. Vietnam is a textbook example of when the homeland isn't threatened, only use soldiers that volunteer for it and have clear objectives.
Dawg this is as retarded as a movie or game putting a female in a SEAL unit.
Women don't fucking make it there in the first place and EVERYONE knows it. It's broken from the start because this frail, 5'3" broad doesn't belong there.