Valley of the Wolves: Iraq, Best Trukish Anti-American Propaganda Action Movie Ever Made Options

[hyzmarca]

Valley of the Wolves is a Turkish television series about a cop who has severe plastic surgery and changes his identity to go undercover to take down Turkish organized crime from the inside. It was extremely popular, and actually very good, good enough to spawn two sequels (one of which was canceled due to political controversy in spite of high ratings) and a movie. That movie is Valley of the Wolves: Iraq. Billy Zane and Gary Busey are in it.

Valley of the Wolves: Iraq is based on the Hood Event, an incident in which US forces accidentally captured a number of Turkish soldiers due to a mutual intelligence mix-up and held them in conditions that were sufficiently humiliating and traumatic to lead to the suicide of one of the Turkish officers.

In real life, the Turkish people saw this as a huge afront to their honor; in the movie Polat Alemdar, hero of Valley of the Wolves, was a friend of the officer who killed himself and decides to get revenge for the incident by going into Iraq and capturing the American general in charge of the occupation (played by Billy Zane), forcing him to wear a hood, and then letting him go unharmed, though the situation escalates well past that by the end of the movie.

The movie also contains fictionalized versions of every other major scandal and abuse by American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, generally played in a way that paints the Americans in a bad light, but all of the incidents are based on real events (except, maybe, the organ harvesting operation).

Some have denounced the participation of once-famous American actors Billy Zane and Gary Busey in this movie, (though little mention is made of the American unknowns who have minor and generally more abrasive roles, such as the soldier who shoots into a truck full of captured civilians, killing several, under the excuse that he is making air holes in the cargo area so that they don't suffocate) but English speaking audiences will find them both extremely sympathetic anti-villains, doing what they believe is right, even if the movie does present them as misguided.

Gary Busey has specifically been accused of antisemitism for his portrayal of a Jewish doctor working as a civilian contractor at Abu Ghraib, but Busey's character is the single most compassionate American in the entire movie, taking the soldiers around him to task for their abuses of prisoners and generally being nice to the prisoners under his care. He even gives them puts them to sleep when harvesting their kidneys for sale (and he only takes one per prisoner, you can live a perfectly normal life one just one kidney) and gives them an ample amount of morphine afterward, which he doesn't have to do at all.

Zane's character, General Sam Marshal, likewise, has several moments where he is presented as a good person in a difficult situation doing what he believes is right and trying to achieve the greatest good for the people in Iraq and has a few long and prominent conversations with Busey's character in which he expresses his generally altruistic concerns and motivations.

There is also a major subplot about a woman whose entire family was slaughtered by Americans in an accidental massacre (one new nervous American solider held his finger on the trigger of his rifle instead of along the side as safe procedure dictates, once the first shot was fired, the chain reaction was pretty much unstoppable) attempting to become a suicide bomber but them being talked out of it by her spiritual advisory, who has a rather long expository monologue about how Islam permits neither suicide nor the murder of civilians and he also prevents local rebels from executing a captured journalist using a similar monologue.

It all ends, of course, with a huge low-budget firefight, not quite up to Hollywood standards, but much better than you'd find in the average B-grade direct to video release. Turkey isn't exactly known for its action blockbusters, and in that context the action scenes in this movie are extraordinarily successful.