“If you want to send a message, try Western Union,” Frank Capra once said about blatant preachiness on film. Yet Capra was a master at instilling moralistic philosophy into his pictures, except he did it with heartwarming stories about virtuous people in some of the greatest films of all time. Modern filmmakers both dismiss that aspect of the craft and lack the skill to create anything close to It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe, and It’s a Wonderful Life.

But in 2001, they found a loftier goal than the genius director who immortalized the year, Stanley Kubrick with 2001: A  Space Odyssey, which was attacking the War on Terror and the American men fighting it. They made an unprecedented number of antiwar pictures slamming those heroes as ignorant pawns or psychopaths — American Soldiers, Redacted (about the rape and murder of a 15-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers), Stop-Loss, The Mark of Cain, Home of the Brave, Green Zone, In the Valley of Elah (a peacenik bridge too far for director Robert Redford) — while our guys were in harm’s way.

Every one of these films lost money, yet they kept coming throughout the whole decade, forming the first deliberate gap between Hollywood and the unwanted “deplorable” audience.