The Death of a Juggernaut: Cultural Analysis on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (2023)

 Joshua Kersting 

Prof. Cawley

ENGL.3616.R01

5 April 2024

The Death of a Juggernaut: Cultural Analysis on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (2023)

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (2023) is an arcadey first-person shooter game, and it is 

the newest entry in the famed series, with the standard edition being released on November 10, 2023, for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S for $70. With a meager development time of only 16 months from the unpopular company under the Activision Blizzard umbrella, Sledgehammer Games spearheads the materialization of the franchise’s 20th AAA project yet already illustrates that Call of Duty is failing to age with grace and to live up to the original Modern Warfare trilogy. Despite being a multicultural zeitgeist, standing as the highest-selling FPS game overall, becoming the biggest American video game franchise ever, and previously having partnership with the United States military, the last few installments of Call of Duty have fallen flat on their face in connecting with their audience and providing an engaging portrayal of military experience, and fans are quick to criticize MWIII for its underwhelming design and gameplay features, abysmal story and character development, and glaring lack of content. I have an attachment to the franchise, replaying the original trilogy countless times as a kid, and my perspective has only shifted slightly with these new entries through my understanding of my relationship to the world and my ever-shifting context. The parallels to real life and themes, being the prison break, domination of private military companies, the spread of misinformation, and the role of occupation, were all reinforced in my play through of the game. It served as a cautionary tale to be wary of information and to not jumpy to the first conclusion, reminded me of the real-world threats that we potentially face, and the shifting dynamics of war. 

Perhaps the most egregious component of MWIII’s campaign is the characterization of 

fan-favorite soldiers who have energized the franchise for over 15 years now. Besides the dilution of many characters, there are still many ways in which the protagonists have been dehumanized in a way that players cannot help to point out. For instance, the survivability of certain characters over others has been picked apart online. So many people cannot believe that Commander Phillip Graves of the private military company Shadow Company returns in this game after being blown up inside of a tank in MWII, Shepherd surviving the brutal cold of Siberia and holding his breath under the frozen lake, or how Soap died while having so much support in the Chunnel. Just look at how Price and Laswell inexplicably survive exposure to the deadly gas, and this does not go unnoticed by commentators like Kelski on YouTube. He remarks, “Captain Price doesn’t go to a hospital or anything—dude smokes a cigar a day, he’s  got iron lungs. So he just wakes up…fully geared…implying that he was passed out moments before, and they’re like: ‘Here’s your headset, let’s get back to work.’ Such scenes paint the protagonists either as invincible supersoldiers who can easily handle anything thrown at them or expendable pawns of the plot that can be discarded for the sake of moving the story along. Similarly, the mental fortitude that these soldiers display is a far cry from the typical psychological torment that combatants endure—even Ghost’s infamous thousand-yard-stare from the last game is absent in favor a static Lt. remaining healthily focused on the objectives. Even Kliski points out that “…You’ll hardly get any more meaningful dialogue during these missions. Also, your allies, if you even have any, are just like: ‘We need to move up!’” and then proceeds to show a compilation of several voice likes consisting of generic phrases to move the player forward. Lastly, the emotional weight of various scenes in the campaign are painfully weak. On top of squeezing witty dialogue in at every opportunity and stifling the soldiers’ emotional range to just violent rage, the death of Soap is crushing to fans, yet the characters stay solemn and nonplussed to the sight of Soap’s murder. This contrasts Price’s dramatic reaction to Soap’s death in the original MW3, with Kelski even noting that Price’s reaction gives nothing in MWIII and it boils down to him saying, “Damn, that’s rough, brother. We got one KIA.” All of this is to say that these representations of war being experienced, lived, and defined pale in comparison to some of the other works, like how one clean shot could make all the difference in American Sniper and Full Metal Jacket; Billy Pilgrim, Chris Kyle, Pvt. Joker, the psy-op specialist in Redeployment, or the paranoid soldiers in Vietnam from Herr’s Dispatches; and the emotional tragedies seen in Full Metal Jacket with Cowboy’s death or Chris Kyle’s struggle to reintegrate.