Hollywood has spent decades supplying the Pentagon with heroic myths, and the Pentagon has spent decades supplying Hollywood with tanks, jets, and aircraft carriers in return. This film traces that exchange, showing how the Department of Defense reviews scripts and demands rewrites before it will loan equipment worth billions, shaping battle scenes in exchange for a favorable portrayal of the military. Oliver Stone, Michael Moore, and Christopher Hedges appear on camera to argue over what that arrangement costs, from recruiting-poster war films to the quiet editing-out of scenes the military finds embarrassing. The film lays out the mechanics of the deal itself: bigger, more spectacular action sequences draw bigger box office, so studios have financial reasons to accept the Pentagon's terms, not just patriotic ones. It also traces the practice back through decades of war films, asking how much of American audiences' sense of their own military history was written not by historians but by negotiators trading footage of fighter jets for approval of a screenplay.