The Modern Warfare 3 ad featuring Sam Worthington and Jonah Hill about a veteran and a “noob” won acclaim and attention. However, former paratrooper and current novel writer and essayist D.B. Grady was not amused by how he saw the ad trivializing war.
“The advertisement trivializes combat and sanitizes war”, he writes. “If this were September 10, 2001, maybe it wouldn’t be quite so bad. Those who are too young to remember Vietnam might indulge in combat fantasies of resting heart rates while rocket-propelled grenades whiz by, and of flinty glares while emptying a magazine into the enemy. But after ten years of constant war, of thousands of amputees and flag-draped coffins, of hundreds of grief-stricken communities, did nobody involved in this commercial raise a hand and say, ‘You know, this is probably a little crass. Maybe we could just show footage from the game’.”
Source: The Atlantic
