1) When interviewed about the negative depiction of extraterrestrials in War of the Worlds, Steven Spielberg stated that even though he once made E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in the post-9-11 world order, he felt the need to tell this tale. Consequently, his new extra-terrestrials no longer swallow Reese’s Pieces but human flesh and bones. 2) The Pentagon screened Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers after the Al-Qaeda World Trade Center attack to learn counterterrorism tactics. 3) Once the aliens have started dispatching buildings and humans left and right, his two children, Robbie and Rachel, ask Cruise’s divorced dad Ray: “Is it the terrorists?” The Bush administration has indeed taught our children that America is indeed in a “war on terror.” 4) Robbie has some homework to do over the weekend he’s staying with daddy. The topic? The French occupation of Algeria. 5) The U.S. army in Spielberg’s familial epic is utterly helpless and quasi-moronic. The tentacled monsters are bound to succeed. Disobeying daddy’s commands, Robbie joins the military following the call of his self-imposed militaristic zealotry. He heads to a certain death. However, he survives, as all his-family-in-crisis does.

Is Robbie perhaps, the new breed of patriotic American, who, after studying the enemy (E.T.s=Terrorists in War of the Worlds’ literal allegory), will undoubtedly prevail, while recognizing his father (of the nation) as such for the first time when he arrives to Boston (yes, the spirit of the Plymouth comes into the picture too) after a long pilgrimage over the devastated East Coast? It looks like it. Throw into the mix Mr. Voiceover (Morgan Freeman) to elevate the prestige of Spielberg’s ultra-nationalistic narrative via the mobilization of H.G. Wells’s text and, once again, like in the Armageddons, Independence Days and Deep Impacts of this universe (now at war with terrorists once the string of pre-millennial paranoias are a forgotten epistemological horizon), humankind becomes the United States of America the Beautiful.

A very small story is what Spielberg set out to recount: a single family’s whereabouts in the midst of the havoc caused by a blood-splattery alien attack. No historical landmarks destroyed (New Jersey is a good stunt double for that matter), and no political big wigs. Only a simple, working-class family whose day-to-day is disturbed by the unthinkable. If H.G. Wells’ leap from the idiosyncrasies of Great Britain into those of humanity as a whole is accomplished by placing the power to defeat the aliens in the nationless micro-organisms that surround all of us since the birth of our planet, the mobilization of the novel’s text allows Spielberg to bridge the gap between the American and the Universal, finding, thus, a perfect alibi to reduce the world to his country of origin. This ideological stance also signals the limits of Spielberg’s allegorical discourse by exposing the formulaic drive—the U.S. stands for the whole world—that informs its very sociopolitical fabric within the terrain of the quasi-exhausted realm of the Hollywood disaster blockbuster. Turtles Can Fly, conversely, strips off all formulae and lays a bare picture of one of the multiple, unprivileged worlds that the Spielbergian epic ignores.

The film is set in a Kurd town turned into a refugee camp on the border between Iraq and Turkey two weeks before the eruption of the U.S-Iraq war. Bahman Ghobadi recounts the death-bound day-to-day of a group of orphaned children working as minefield deactivators. The townspeople are trying to change the orientation of their antennae to get news of when the war will start. “Satellite,” the teenage leader and caretaker of the hundreds of orphans, reports to the elder men that their antennae will not work, but a satellite dish would—the town is excluded from the thousand of discourses about the imminent U.S. intervention that flooded news channels. Soon after, Satellite goes to a neighboring market to buy a satellite dish for the town. He pays in cash and land mines. Aside from money, mines have become the strongest currency in this part of the world. It is through these destructive assets that the children can make a living and, at the same time, easily fall prey of death any day and anytime.

The town’s inhabitants find out about the beginning of the war through the satellite dish. Hengov—who everyone refers to as the “armless boy”—warns the refugees about the upcoming conflict since he has the ability to foretell the future. Not accidentally, all his predictions anticipate tragic events. In this part of the world, Ghobadi seems to say, there’s no way out of death or physical suffering. Once Hengov’s prediction is fulfilled and the war erupts, Ghobadi resorts to the utilization of newsreel footage. We see a few hi-tech U.S. bombers taking off, a machine gun in action, and Saddam Hussein’s falling statue. These very spectacular, Western images fail to encompass the suffering of the limbless children of the Iraqi-Turkish border like and thus only offer to those hooked to the worldwide networks of information a partial view of the complex course of events that the use of military power causes.

Immediately after, the film returns to the diegetic universe of the Kurd town as two U.S. Apache helicopters fly by, throwing U.S. propagandistic pamphlets to the refugees gathered in a hill: “liberation is coming.” By juxtaposing these two discourses—one belonging to the average media coverage of warfare in the lands beyond the West and the other an instance of simplistic propaganda, Turtles Can Fly uncovers the perverted partial discursivity that has structured the Western media reporting of the Middle East conflict and, more extensively, the coverage of warfare since we plunged into the so-called media age.

Once the U.S. military arrives, they do not bring freedom. They simply shift the power positions between the different kinds of aggressors that may strike against the Kurd refugees. Satellite runs afoul of a mine. To ease his pain, his 6-year old subordinate, Shirkooh, brings him a present: an arm of Saddam Hussein’s statue that he has traded with the American soldiers in town. In fact, he reports to Satellite that the mine business is no longer profitable and that the soldiers have told him that what they will sell now are things like the arm. The very signs of the clean-cut version of the war that Western media have endlessly promoted substitute now for the killing mines as valuable currency.

In the closing sequence of the film, Satellite stands, helped by casts, on the side of the road. American soldiers trot by, pursuing their next military target. Soon Satellite starts walking in the opposite direction. Now he has realized they won’t change anything in the world in which he lives. As temporary occupants, their goals point to a different direction.

The “mine children” fight Terror in their own way, one that equally comes from the governments of their native countries and the Western powers’ Middle East war crusade. This is a world Steven Spielberg and the flocks of mediocre filmmakers that repeatedly imitate his technical cinematic mastery have chosen to ignore. Poor, armless boys and girls don’t sell that many tickets.