According to Channing Tatum’s official website (no, I’m actually not a regular visitor, but I guess it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that I spend my free time collecting information on a young, strapping “naturally talented dancer that taught himself how to dance by attending coming-of-age parties in the Hispanic community called Quiceneras when he was growing up in Tampa, Florida”), Kimberley Pierce’s troubled Iraq war drama Stop-Loss will be screening (premiering?) at the SXSW Film Festival in March.

Stop-Loss, Pierce’s first film since the Oscar-winning Boys Don’t Cry in 1999, was initially supposed to open last fall. According to various blog posts, it was then bumped to early March, then to April, and is now scheduled to open on March 28. When the first trailer for the film appeared online in October, Anne Thompson wrote that the Stop-Loss team were “heaving huge sighs of relief that they did not go out this fall, where they would have gotten lumped in with all the other ’serious’ ‘Iraq’ movies.” But regardless of timing, the film has already been damned, to some extent, by synopsis and marketing campaign alone.

Stop-Loss is one of those questioning-Iraq films that a certain segment of the blogosphere loves to hate unseen. But it’s not just partisans who are concerned that Stop-Loss is unfairly anti-military. Check out this lengthy review of the film’s trailer, from a blogger who first disclaims that the stop-loss program that sets the film in motion––which allows soldiers who have already served their proscribed tour of duty to be sent back into combat against their will––”a shitty fucking deal…stop-loss is the draft wearing a cheap wig and fake nose-and-glasses combo, and the draft is bad for everyone involved.”

That said, Ryan Phillippe’s character Sgt. Brandon King nonetheless manages to come across less a betrayed soldier and more a petulant, unheroic brat in the preview. When King says to his father, “This family is done fighting this war,” his complaint is not that the war is unjust, but that he’s done his part and doesn’t want to do any more. That’s realistic as hell, sure, but it’s not a heroic trait: heroes are fundamentally unrealistic. Specifically, heroes are unrealistic in that they willingly expose themselves to more danger than they have to rather than run away because they’ve been treated unfairly.

The problem is not that stop-loss as a policy is not wrong; the problem is that the Ryan Phillippe character’s objection to it is rendered as cowardice, and “cowards” make bad movie heroes. But can you imagine a film that questions/critiques the war itself and the policy/ideology behind it, and still satisfy a mainstream audience’s need for old-school heroics? Isn’t this basically looking for Rambo in the wrong place?