by Louis Williams

Created on: February 26, 2010

                  Tropic Thunder

First (historically speaking), there was the book, Tropic Thunder, written by a Viet Nam veteran, who is hired as a technical advisor for the film. He has artificial hands—hooks, in fact—becauses he was wounded. Then you have the film of the book being shot in South East Asia a generation and more later and starring the following: Ben Stiller, a washed up leading man who has made flop after flop, particularly a Ramboesque action adventure series of at least five sequels, as well as a series in which he plays someone like Forrest Gump; Jack Black, another setting star, now a confirmed druggie; Robert Downey, Jr. the method actor from hell, here playing a black sergeant, this after undergoing skin treatments to get himself into character. Somewhere in his past, Downey’s character (the actor, not the black sergeant) was born in Australia.

The film’s director, an Englishman, feeling that his actors aren’t giving the picture their all, decides to send his cast into the jungle, gives them a script and a physical direction for their patrol, relies on hidden cameras to capture them in action and leaves the rest to nature—cinema-verité, in other words. The only trouble, from the director’s point of view, is that he steps on a land mine and is blown to pieces, this taken by most of the actors as a trick to get them into the mood for their big scene, only one or two of them realizing that the director really did blow up. The rest, whose job is making fiction, can’t tell the fake from the real.

And here you have a fable: they go on their patrol, come under fire—real fire—from Laotian opium growers, are captured by them, Stiller finding that he is a great celebrity for his Forrest Gumpish character since the opium growers have one of his Gump films as their total film library, have seen it dozens of times, know every line and immediately recognize Stiller and insist that he play the role for them live. Downey, in the meantime, can’t quite get it straight that he is not black, even though he is reminded of his Australian birth. Black, a junkie in the Golden Triangle, is simply off the map.

Nonetheless, the three of them and the rest of the squad survive, save Stiller, save one another and gradually come to realize that, unlike most of their lives, their adventures in the jungle are real, and that

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