I recently, rather belatedly, caught up with Angelina Jolie's second directorial effort, Unbroken (2014), a biopic adapted from Laura Hillenbrand's 2010 book about the tortures experienced by the American Olympic athlete Louis Zamperini in a Japanese prisoner of war camp during the Second World War. Although the Coen brothers are on the writing credits, it's a rather formulaic film featuring a square-jawed hero, a monotonously fiendish camp guard, and predictable geopolitical biases. As Adelaide Martinez puts it, Unbroken

"tells a pretty standard US centric story about the Pacific theater during WW2. In the standard story, there is usually a single white hero, the person who sets and interprets the story for the viewer. They are like Cool Hand Luke, getting up over and over again, no matter how many times they are struck down, overcoming the great challenges put in front of them – usually put there by the Japanese. If Japanese are given roles at all, it’s either non-speaking ‘people who sit in a room planning war actions’ or the single sadist that tortures and violates the hero of the camp."

The Cool Hand Luke reference is apposite here, since Jolie's film doesn't stint on the Christic imagery, most obviously when Zamperini is forced to hold aloft a wooden beam as a punishment - a feat that he accomplishes with the superhuman stamina that is statutory in this genre. Indeed, Zamperini is crudely heroised here and as several critics have noted, the film elides some unhappy biographical details, such as Zamperini's post-war struggle with alcoholism, that, had they been kept in, might have made for a more complex tale. Indeed, Unbroken lacks the psychological subtlety (and musical delights) of Nagisa Oshima's classic Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, the film it most obviously invokes.

The problem is not just that the film is oversimplified and bowdlerised. There's also a sort of false balance at work here. Jolie draws a parallel between Zamperini's brutal mistreatment in the Pacific and, through a series of flashbacks, his experiences of anti-Italian racism in the US. Superficially, at least, this seems an even-handed gesture aimed at establishing some kind of equivalence between racism at home and abroad. Yet a fairer and more salient comparison would have been between the undeniably appalling suffering of US soldiers in the Pacific - which Jolie actually depicts with restraint - and the savage treatment of the Japanese by the Americans in the same theatre, up to and including the dropping of the atomic bombs. That would have made for a far less patriotic picture and it is clear that Jolie et al did not want to go there. The Yanks, after all, were supposed to be the good guys.

I wasn't entirely surprised by the film's national chauvinism. As I argued in a previous blog post, Jolie's 2011 directorial debut In the Land of Blood and Honey is a tendentious effort in which the complexities of the Bonian war are reduced to a morality tale of heroic Bosnians and cartoonishly monstrous Serb villains - the standard presentation of the conflict in Western media and political circles (indeed, Jolie's research for that film included a meeting with US General Wesley Clark). And let's face it, it's not easy to make a critical film about WWII, which was, according to patriotic myth, a 'good war' fought by America's 'greatest generation'.

Nevertheless, it is possible to do better. In the best war films we witness the chaos of conflict, the dissent in the ranks, the soldiers' cowardice and bravery, heroism and meanness, and the sufferings of 'the enemy'. Such films communicate what the psychologist Lawrence Le Shan calls the 'sensory reality of war'. Take, for example, Terence Malick's richly phenomenological The Thin Red Line, a Pacific War film in which the overwhelming force of this 'sensory reality' exposes the narrowness of military discourse and poses a direct challenge to official propaganda ('They want you dead - or in their lie', in the stark words of First Sergeant Edward Welsh). The island of Guadalcanal is perceived by many of the film's soldiers in a highly subjective mode as a liminal space between life and death, a contradictory place of man-made horror and natural plenitude that is filled with the sights and sounds of human suffering but which also pullulates with exotic plant and animal life (Malick's earlier Badlands also exploits such narratively 'unmotivated' images of the natural world). It is a heterotopia, in Foucault's sense, an 'other' place which facilitates different ways of seeing and knowing and which opens a minimal space for social critique. Here idealized conceptions of the Good War or martial heroism are rendered absurd by the sheer abundance and diversity of Life. But in Unbroken, as in In the Land of Blood and Honey, we are taken to a very different place; here we enter into Le Shan's 'mythic reality of war': a Manichean realm of good versus evil in which the confusions and contradictions of armed conflict - and the experiences of enemy Others - are imperceptible, foreclosed by convention and cliché.

These failings matter not just because Unbroken was a huge box office draw, but also because Jolie, as a result of her work with the UN and her earlier cinematic performances in 'humanitarian' films such as Beyond Borders, has achieved a certain global standing as a celebrity liberal philanthropist. In its pro-US sentiment and soft orientalism, Unbroken recalls some of Hollywood's earlier gung-ho and historically dubious treatments of the war in the Pacific, such as Michael Bay's 2001 turkey Pearl Harbour. But Bay could never be mistaken for anything other than a conservative jingoist; Jolie, by contrast, has a reputation as a thoughtful humanist devoted to 'good causes'. To earn this reputation, Jolie will have to use her considerable resources - including her evident passion for political filmmaking - to better effect in future projects. Her forthcoming Netflix drama about the Cambodian genocide has been produced by the brilliant Rithy Panh, so all hope is not yet lost.

I haven't had much time to blog recently; but it has certainly been a fascinating few weeks for those of us interested in critical media analysis, not least because of the Kony 2012 viral video, which - apparently backed by Justin Bieber, Oprah Winfrey, Lady Gaga and Rihanna - brought imperialist propaganda into the age of social media and celebrity clicktivism. The video's argument, which promotes armed intervention in Uganda, have been suitably demolished elsewhere. A recent video from the prolific Syrian Girl provides some of the geopolitical context and discusses some of the persuasive methods used in the video. Not that I would support all of her arguments. While agreeing with her critique of US imperialism, I don't, as readers of this blog might have guessed, share her admiration for the principle of 'national sovereignty'.

Kony 2012 was also endorsed, predictably enough, by Angelina Jolie, whose new Bosnian war film In the Land of Blood and Honey - her first film as a director - premiered this month. For now, at least, I shall refrain from indulging in yet another diatribe against one-sided, anti-Serb filmmaking (see previous blog post). Suffice to say that, like the Kony 2012 video, the film seems to be a pro-imperialist treatise - hardly surprising given Jolie's publicly stated views about the Bosnian war and her reliance on interviews with US government and security officials during her research for the film. The Serbs, as usual, stand in for the kind of 'bad men' that Jolie is now arguing should be stopped by Western 'intervention' in Syria ('I think Syria has gotten to a point, sadly, where some form of, certainly, where some sort of intervention is absolutely necessary', said Jolie in a recent interview). Bosnia continues, it seems, to serve as a model for those who advocate military violence in the name of humanitarianism.

The recent killing of Osama Bin Laden provoked widespread criticism among left-wing and radical commentators. This is hardly surprising; after all, even among liberals, Osama's value to the Western powers as a scapegoat and all-round bogeyman was well understood. By contrast, the events surrounding Ratko Mladić's arrest, and in particular its media reporting, have elicited far fewer expressions of concern, either from mainstream journalists or from radical and leftist bloggers. 

On The Guardian's Comment Is Free blog, Misha Glenny (whose book The Fall of Yugoslavia lays the blame for the break-up of the country squarely, but in my view quite unfairly, at the door of Serb nationalists) praises the Serbian president Boris Tadić for the part he played in capturing the Butcher of Srebrenica. But as Glenny himself acknowledges, bringing Serb war criminals to justice has been a key condition of Serbia's EU membership; for this reason alone, the president's deliverance of Mladić can be seen as an act not of moral resolution, but of political expediency.

As well as smoothing Serbia's passage to EU membership, much of the recent media reporting of Mladić's arrest reinforces longstanding Western propaganda about the Bosnian war. Rather like Glenny's article, Henry Porter's recent piece in The Guardian, for example, implies that the war in Bosnia was perpetrated solely by Serbs and that the war's only victims were Muslims. By focusing on Serb atrocities and omitting any mention of the role of the Western powers in the devastation of Yugoslavia, the news media continues to present the great powers' manifold economic, political and military manoeuvres in the region - including the brutal Operation Storm in 1995 and the decisive bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 - as so many noble interventions in the fight against virulent Serb nationalism.

The virtual absence of any challenge to the media's recurrent presentation of the Bosnian war as a Manichean struggle between good ('the West') and evil (the Serbs) shows just how deeply the dominant narrative of that war has penetrated public consciousness - and just how far down the memory hole anything resembling an adequate account of the Balkan wars has been shoved.

We can have no sympathy for Mladić, who surely now faces severe punishment for his crimes. But to celebrate his arrest, as Timothy Garton Ash does in another Guardian Comment Is Free contribution, as evidence of 'a global movement towards accountability' is to ignore the fact that 'international justice' operates systematically in the interests of the powerful. That is why Mladić is now languishing in The Hague - and why Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright are not.