Call Of Duty Movie Director Promises Storytelling About ‘The Cost Of War’ That The Series Never Lives Up To

You might recall that there’s a Call of Duty movie in the works from Paramount Pictures, directed by Peter Berg and planned for release in June of 2028. Beyond the fact that it takes place in the Modern Warfare continuity of events and that Berg is co-writing the screenplay with Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan, we don’t know an awful lot about what it might entail, except that Berg has recently reassured us that it will not be like “cartoon characters or comic books,” but will instead be “nuanced” and will really look “at the cost of war.” This comes from a press junket for Berg’s other upcoming film, The Mosquito Bowl, which comes out this year and is also about the U.S. military. Comicbook went to that event, and got Berg saying a few things about Call of Duty in the process. As Berg explains: So Modern Warfare, if you really look at the missions, and the storylines, and the characters—like Captain Price, and Soap, and Ghost, and Alex—these are complicated humans. These are not—and no disrespect—cartoon characters or comic books. These are very nuanced storylines; like, there’s a real soul to the Modern Warfare universe… And, yes, there’s violence, and there’s hardware, and equipment, and there’s killing—but underneath it I think the game, and the creators of the game, are really looking at the cost of war, the cost of having to be a warrior who’s, for whatever reason, chosen to put himself between real danger and the rest of us, and the burden that these guys carry. And that’s real stuff. This is not just “Hey, let’s shoot them all up and shoot popcorn!” Like, there’s a soul underneath it, that I understand [and] that Taylor Sheridan understands, and I think probably [it will not be] quite as graphically violent as Mosquito Bowl, but there will be a very strong soul, and consequence of war within the film Call of Duty. I don’t begrudge Berg for promoting his movies, nor do I have anything ill to say about him specifically. He’s worked on several things I liked and a lot of things I’ve never seen. But these comments about Call of Duty stuck out to me immediately as a PR line I’ve previously heard about the Call of Duty games, and in fact many other U.S.-centric war-themed video games, many times: the idea that these portrayals are somehow doing something unique and different by telling people that war is bad, specifically for soldiers, specifically for U.S. soldiers. This comes up a lot! Call of Duty as a franchise has historically swung back and forth in its advertisements as an over-the-top, military superhero fantasy on one hand, and a purported vehicle for communicating the realistic grit and pain of war on the other. One of the best examples of a swing toward realism is perhaps 2019’s Modern Warfare: there’s a 2019 Washington Post story about the development of Modern Warfare and how a focus on realistic scenarios was intended to make the game “morally gray.” Other interviews from that press cycle emphasize that developers wanted the player to feel conflicted and even bad: there’s that repeated story about a woman seemingly reaching for a gun, but then you realize she’s grabbing her baby. If you shoot her, you should feel bad about it. Another interview with GameSpot suggested players should learn about war through play ala Schoolhouse Rock. And that’s all just for 2019’s Modern Warfare—we’ve seen very similar PR messaging for Call of Duty games on and off for years, for games including World War II, Vanguard, and the other Modern Warfares. Similar marketing has also been done for Battlefield, Six Days in Fallujah, and other games. You can go back and read the reviews of Modern Warfare, or just play it yourself, to determine whether or not Activision was successful in whatever message it was trying to deliver about the horrors of war. What’s bothering me is the ongoing need for Call of Duty as a whole to insist it’s performing some sort of public service by telling everyone how hard yet noble war is, with a lens focused particularly on glorifying the soldiers of a country that keeps on perpetuating it. You can understand my skepticism as to the ability of anything labeled Call of Duty to get a “nuanced” story about war correct here. Plenty of good writing has been done on the problems with Call of Duty: its rampant jingoism, its racism toward Muslims and Arabs, its promotion of the U.S. military-industrial complex and potential use as a recruitment tool, I could go on. Every few games or so, the series makes some odd motions in the direction of pretending it’s gotten better about all this without actually acknowledging the problems, touting how it wants to shed a light on what war really is while ignoring that the reason so many people play these games year after year is because, mostly, they think it’s fun to shoot virtual guns with their friends, and Activision’s rotation of studios is (often, if not always) pretty good at making sure that’s a consistently good time. The popularity of the online multiplayer is evidence enough of that. There’s nothing particularly wrong with that last bit, either. It is, in fact, largely the swings Call of Duty takes at being a more serious war game that have produced its most grievous issues, at least in recent years. Remember the waterboarding minigame? Jesus Christ. So while I don’t doubt Berg is trying to make a Serious War Movie here, I struggle to see its existence as anything more than another attempt by Activision (and now Xbox) to once again reassure everyone that Call of Duty is something quite serious, something of Importance and Good in society. It’s not a series about being a superhero, or running around and having fun shooting things with your friends, no. It’s about how much “soul” there is in war, how serious it is to be a soldier “put[ting] himself between real danger and the rest of us.” The U.S. would absolutely never go to war for the wrong reason, would never send our neighbors and fellow citizens to die or to acquire horrible injuries or PTSD for foolish reasons like greed or racism or pure stupidity. No, we must once again consider the “cost of war” for the U.S., as told by video games and now movies about video games, and be gravely reminded of our own duty to support it.