Three Kings Critical Essay

According to Georgetown scholar Erin Elizabeth Hill-Parks,
"fictional war films construct ideologies of war through narrative that oftentake the place of actual knowledge of war,"

as in the 1999 film Three Kings. Hill-Parks continues her argument by listing films

of feel good army movies such as Pauly Shores In the Army Now, and Tom Cruise’s Top Gun
framed in this prior to 9/11, but post-Vietnam time frame. In addition, Hill-Parks credits these
films as “rehabilitation of the military image in the early 1990s was America’s claimed victory in the Gulf War of 1991.” Hills-Park states “The declaration of victory at the end of Operation Desert Storm (the Gulf War) signified a so-called moral victory that was absent at the end of the Vietnam War,” which was important to the storyline of Three Kings in which she expresses ideas of the film being selected as a more serious war film for the period. Finally Hills-Park concludes her analysis of the film as a black comedy that “questions the reas ons for the Gulf War, and what was gained from it, as well as the mental state of the soldiers.”