Welcome everyone to the Empire Files podcast. This is Mike Prysner here in studio with Abby Martin.

Do you ever feel that when you're watching previews of new movies, or you go to the movie theater, or rent a movie on Amazon or whatever, or watch it on TV, that you're being fed a bit of Pentagon propaganda, U.S. military propaganda, or pro-war propaganda. Well, if you got that feeling, you would be right. Not just because Hollywood and the establishment elites who control

the culture and art that we see are just ideologically aligned with the military and with the

Pentagon and are therefore putting out content that represents their worldview as people who are

part of the ruling class or aspiring to be part of the ruling

class. But the Pentagon, the U.S. military, the U.S. Army in particular, actually are playing

a role in writing movies, in providing so-called guidance to them, and things of that nature.

So this is a really fascinating topic that we are going to get into today.

We're talking to Alan McLeod from Mint Press News, who just did a really important piece on this,

and he's going to be breaking it all down for us.

But before we hear from Alan, I wanted to say that, you know, this is a topic that Abby and I have been interested in for quite some time.

And our interest was sparked in this when we realized that a very favorite movie of ours, The Abyss, which is an excellent sci-fi film about aliens, or not exactly aliens,

but another advanced life form that lives at the very bottom of the ocean, that humans make contact with

for the first time. We learned that the ending, and this is a James Cameron film, the ending

was changed. And why was that ending changed? I'm going to tell you the ending. So fast forward

about a minute, if you don't want to hear what happens at the end of the abyss, if you haven't seen it, you need to go watch it immediately.

But apparently the original ending of the film, the life forms at the bottom of the ocean,

once they are discovered by humans and make that contact, the end of the movie is that the

life forms in the bottom of the ocean create this massive tsunami tidal wave that comes

above over all the cities on the coast of the world and is about to crash down just

destroying all of the cities that people are living in and then the wave just freezes

and then it goes back to normal and the whole point is that it is a warning against

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