The new Netflix movie “Purple Hearts” is receiving backlash despite being one of the platform’s “most-watched” offerings right now, with more than 100 million streaming hours, per Buzzfeed. Critics call it “anti-Arab” and “pro-military propaganda,” but the film’s director has a different take.
On the Netflix page, the romantic comedy is described as being about “an aspiring musician [who] agrees to a marriage of convenience with a soon-to-deploy Marine, but a tragedy soon turns their fake relationship all too real.” The main character Cassie (Sofia Carson) marries Luke (Nicholas Galitzine) after being diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes and struggling to afford insulin.
The backlash against the movie’s themes became so extreme that the film’s director decided to address it.
“Purple hearts is us military propaganda that uses the invasion & deaths of 1.2 million iraqis as a romcom,” one detractor shared. “Not to mention him defending his racist friend & telling her to sit down & stop it when she called him out after he was cheering with ‘hunting down some g**damm Arabs.”
“I don’t get the hype in the movie ‘purple hearts.’ clearly a straight up military propaganda + the blatant racism in it,” another Twitter critic responded in a now-deleted tweet, per Buzzfeed. “a latina changing her beliefs just to be with a white military racist guy. enemies to lovers only work in books.”
“I hope that people understand that in order for characters to grow, they need to be flawed in the beginning. So we very much intentionally created two characters that had been bred to hate each other,” director Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum told Variety.
She explained how the characters being “flawed” was an intentional decision. “In order for the red heart and the blue heart to kind of turn purple, you have to have them be kind of extreme. Some of the people that they’re surrounded with are even more flawed than they are,” she continued.
“…They learn to become more moderate and to listen to each other and to love,” Rosenbaum said. “That was the biggest, most important part of the theme. I do hope that anyone who’s in any way insulted by it understands that our intentions are very pure, and it’s because we feel like people need to grow and need to start to become more moderate.”
Carson agreed, saying the negative perception by fans is missing the point.
“Why I fell in love with the movie is that it’s a love story but it’s so much more than that,” Carson agreed. “It’s two hearts, one red, one blue, two worlds apart, who are really raised to hate each other. Through the power of love, they learn to lead with empathy and compassion and love each other and turn into this beautiful shade of purple. We wanted to represent both sides as accurately as possible.”