It's too bad that liberal Aaron Sorkin allowed his biases to enter into Charlie's War, as the film had a chance to be a really interesting and engaging look into an amazing time in American history. Now it's not worth seeing because it's based on a lot of fabrications and slants manufactured by Aaron Sorkin.
Sorkin is the Hollywood liberal who also expressed his biases on The Left Wing "The West Wing," where he unceasingly attacked conservatives.
What is especially bad about the film, is it portrays the old error and lie that Osama bin Laden had received CIA funding and weapons, while being a direct influence in battling the Soviets until they left Afghanistan.
The reality is Bin Laden wasn't even involved with the situation until years after Soviet troops left in 1989. It was then that he got involved in extremist activity in the country.
Charlie's War Trailer
Of course the whole myth is the involvement of the CIA with funding Osama bin Laden was what eventually led to the attack on the United States on September 11. Unfortunately Sorkin turns this into another stupid and ignorant attempt at changing a true story into his own political bent.
Even Charlie Wilson protested writers saying there was some type of connection between the CIA, bin Laden, Afghanistan and 9/11.
The idea that Wilson was instrumental in getting stinger missles into the war is misguided and untrue. Originally he was against them until everyone started seeing them taking down Soviet gunships. (The stinger is widely credited with being the reason the Afghans won the war.) It wasn't until later that Wilson got on board with the stingers.
Like I said, the real story is fascinating and interesting, and telling it like it really happened would have been a lot of fun to watch.
Now that people like Sorkin can no longer write and present the basic truths concerning an important historical event, I'm sure not going to waste my time seeing the movie. If the truth would have been included in the film, I would have been really interested in seeing the story on the big screen.
It's one thing to add interesting insertions into a story to make it entertaining, and even humorous, we can all accept that, but when you market a film in a way that says it's based on a true story, then the underlying basis of the story needs to be true. It can't be made up according to what someone wished had happened. That's not historical storytelling, that's fiction. It should have been marketed as such.
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