Last night I had the pleasure of seeing Blood of Eagles, the second in an Indonesian War of Independence trilogy by Dallas’ son-and-father team of Conor and Rob Allyn. (The second Film Festival showing is Thursday at 4 pm at the Angelika.) The audience let out some cheers and applause when the good guys beat the bad guys. The good guys were, of course, the terrorists whom we now regard as the freedom fighters (history has a way of turning one into the other; see War of Independence, American). The bad guys were our allies, the Dutch. The Dutch had a good rationale for imposing themselves on the poor Indonesians: the disparate peoples of the East Indies were too fractured into ethnic and religious groups to build a nation. To protect the Indonesians from the perils of self-government, the Dutch had to resort to killing and torturing, but hey, you gotta do what you gotta do when you are trying to help.
Made me wonder whether  a Dutch son and father in the not-too-distant future will make a film about Iraqi or Afghan or, going back 100 years, Filipino good guys against the bad guy Americans. And will a Dallas audience cheer and applaud then?
Probably. History does not pay much attention to good intentions. It tends to pay more attention to results and the carnage inflicted to achieve them. Movie audiences certainly do.