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The Manchurian Candidate: Paramount Pictures
The Manchurian Candidate
(2004)Lots of veterans return home with post-traumatic stress disorder, but what if the nightmares they tried to suppress were artificially implanted? In the original 1962 version of the film, Korean War vets Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey come to realize they were brainwashed by Communists; in Jonathan Demme's even more paranoid remake, Gulf War vets Denzel Washington (shown, left with Jeffrey Wright), Liev Schreiber, and Wright are victimized by America's own military-industrial complex. All three give haunting performances; you don't have to buy the conspiratorial sci-fi aspect to appreciate the film's depiction of these soldiers as pawns manipulated and transformed into ticking time bombs by untouchable masters of war.
