American Sniper

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Cinema Discusso > American Sniper

Snowman_McK: Jan 31, 2010

That seems like some sort of horrible moral conundrum. Is it worse to shoot a kid and feel bad, or not shoot a kid but feel no remorse shooting adults?

# ¿ Jan 22, 2015 00:03

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 07:51

Snowman_McK: Jan 31, 2010

It would make sense if those positions attracted a very, very odd breed of person. I know you have to be pretty exceptional to qualify, but it would be an odd personality type to want to apply.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2015 05:38

Snowman_McK: Jan 31, 2010

Charlz Guybon posted:

I think the rise of ISIS from the ashes of AQI and their success in taking over much of northern Iraq and eastern Syria has made a pro-Iraq War movie much more palatable to the general public.

Wow, we, as a culture are black belts at missing the point.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2015 08:03

Snowman_McK: Jan 31, 2010

I thnk it's a little odd that I've heard the word used so often as an insult.

# ¿ Jan 26, 2015 22:22

Snowman_McK: Jan 31, 2010

Which is doubly angering, since Eastwood dodged ever going to war. If memory served he schmoozed his way out of it.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2015 00:01

Snowman_McK: Jan 31, 2010

socketwrencher posted:

Who knows, maybe there's some guilt involved. Regardless, I don't think it invalidates the intention behind the movie. I read it as less propaganda and more public service announcement.

If you're correct, it's "You don't know what it was like over there" from someone who never went there and who worked actively to avoid it.

Finding out Eastwood is kind of a lovely person has damaged some of his earlier films. Gran Torino becomes two hours of a wealthy old white man explaining to a marginalised minority why political correctness is bad.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2015 09:04

Snowman_McK: Jan 31, 2010

Darko posted:

Are you joking here? Because that was made, by David Simon, and called Generation Kill, and was about how hosed up Iraq was, and hits on half of the points you were talking about (but focuses more on how middle management incompetence makes things even worse).

It's a great show, and the book is excellent too.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2015 21:45

Snowman_McK: Jan 31, 2010

Slugworth posted:

Everything else in your post has been responded to, but this stuck out to me. Do you really not see the difference in tone between American Sniper and The Pacific? The Pacific is a pretty brutal depiction of american soldiers in a war that American film makers almost never depict in anything but a 'God bless our soldiers!!' way. It was fairly shocking coming from the people behind Band Of Brothers.

It has admittedly been awhile since I saw it, but I remember being deeply uncomfortable frequently by the actions of the soldiers. American Sniper? Not so much.

It actually makes a pretty sharp contrast to Band of Brothers, especially it's depiction of battle. Band of Brothers places great emphasis on the tactics, on the geography and technology. It's brilliant for armchair generals or people that really know the tactics of the time (and masterfully recreated, I think I could draw a pretty clear diagram of every battle in the show)
The Pacific, by contrast, is hordes of faceless enemies hurling themselves at the marines until they stop. Then the marines trudge on to the next unclear objective against a vague enemy and do it again, and they slowly all go mad.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2015 02:47

Snowman_McK: Jan 31, 2010

K. Waste posted:

Two thirds of Fury were so loving good.

Fixed.

Smoothrich posted:

Just seems wrong to attack this guy so much

Also seems a little weird to venerate him so much.

quote:

Too racist! Not racist enough!

Almost like it was a disjointed film that didn't know what point it was making, or even if it was making one.

Snowman_McK fucked around with this message at 07:16 on Feb 18, 2015

# ¿ Feb 18, 2015 07:12

Snowman_McK: Jan 31, 2010

K. Waste posted:

Nope.

That last battle was loving retarded and snuck in from a much, much worse movie. It was Windtalkers level of ridiculous.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2015 07:35

Snowman_McK: Jan 31, 2010

K. Waste posted:

It made precisely as much cosmological sense to me as the opening scene. It's not precisely like it comes out of nowhere, the entire film is building up to it from the moment we open in the smoked out, poo poo hole crater of mud and shrapnel.

Would you mind elaborating on what 'cosmological sense' means? I'm not being facetious, I have honestly never encountered those two words together before.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2015 07:47

Snowman_McK: Jan 31, 2010

K. Waste posted:

By cosmology I should be clear that I don't mean scientific cosmology, but religious cosmology. In the religious sense, cosmology describes not necessarily a study but a structure of beliefs regarding the origins and ultimate fate of the universe. Fury is loaded with cosmological imagery that is treated in the film proper as part of a self-contained cosmos or universe, which is itself a metaphor for the ultimate fate of war.

The film opens with a silhouetted Nazi captain emerging from the darkness and smoke astride a white horse. And while in colloquial terms the words "white" and "pale" are often erroneously equated, this figure represents the apocalyptic spectre of Death as revealed in Revelations. Nobody else is alive, this figure rides alone consumed in a chaotic void that currently lacks form. We don't see the battle that 'created' this world, and so we are left instead with the formless void, the Genesis of War.

Emerging from the formless void is a lone figure who will soon come to be revealed as Wardaddy (literally the Father of War), who leaps upon the figure of death and tellingly stabs him in the eye. The imagery of the eye recalls the Germanic pagan deity Odin/Wotan, except rather than a self-sacrifice in order to attain wisdom, this act is inverted as a desecration of German volk culture initiated by an invading force. This imagery is made doubly potent when Lerman's character discovers half of the previous gunner's face inside Fury, specifically his cheek and dead eye. The Genesis of Fury is the staging of an alchemical exchange between the invading and occupying forces, each representing tacitly different spiritual ideologies but ultimately feuding for dominance over the same 'formless void' of chaos: Christianity for the Allies, and Volk paganism for the Nazis.

Of course, both of these spiritual perspectives are, indeed, more rhetorical than literal. Only Bible abstains from sex with 'the conquered women,' and the Nazis/German people clearly aren't pagans. Rather, War itself is the religion, forming the entire foundation of the film's cosmos.

The final battle sequence distills this cosmological metaphor through yet another alchemical exchange: The same beings that first emerged from the 'formless void' of Genesis are now committed to their ultimate apocalyptic fate - their death in the service of their religion. Ayer represents this vividly by this time having Lerman/"Machine", the gunner, survive the ordeal, but his comrades fall, looking back as Ayer's dissolves twice to a God's eye view looking down on the ultimate fate of the Fury, forming the iris of an eye looking back out upon the viewer. What we see in the end of the film is a cyclical wraparound to the 'formless void' of the opening, in anticipation of a ceaseless cycle of war. Apocalypse leading to new Genesis.

Now that we reach the end, the imagery of the eye also works in another cosmological sense: "An Eye for an Eye."

That's a really cool reading. Mine seems like a really petty complaint after that lyrical loving analysis.
It's not quite a tactical realism thing (I'm not an expert, or even really an enthusiast) it just felt out of place. Every battle in it was horribly brutal. It was messy, and really captured just how vague and terrifying their viewpoints were. Every victory seemed to come with a steep cost, and death was painted as being everywhere, cruel, quick and random.
Then, in the last battle, hundreds of elite German soldiers just throw themselves at a fixed position. It works well at first. It was a great battle scene. Then it just went on too goddamn long. It was long enough that I started to see the seams, I started to wonder just why these Germans were so stubborn about attacking this position from the same direction. I started to spot contrivances of the scene, like the guys who are literally 3 metres away firing no weapons, just running so that Pitt can casually shoot them. The Germans forget about those really effective anti tank weapons they handed out to children in the first act. They forget that they actually have guns for much of it.
It's not really unique to Fury. It's all the same cliches as in every other "heroic last stand" and there's the problem. It's all those cliches. And the scene is long enough for immersion to be broken and for me to just start counting the cliches. Plenty of bits in it are still great, but it's twenty minutes. It's essentially a short film, which is more than enough time for my immersion to be ruined.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2015 08:48

Snowman_McK: Jan 31, 2010

Perestroika posted:

I can agree with the general thrust of that complaint, but there's one particular thing that's being brought up regularly that I'd disagree with: If I remember correctly, nowhere in the movie it's ever stated that the battallion is in any way elite. All it does say is that they're SS, which I'd argue is mostly supposed to minimise any moral ambiguity by drawing a connection to the mostly SS-perpetrated crimes we'd seen up to that point. Essentially it's to impress upon the viewer that those guys really have it coming, so to speak. While towards the beginning of the war there were a bunch of elite Waffen-SS formations, the same does not necessarily hold true in 1945. They might as well have been a highly motivated but completely untested rear-line police unit pressed into frontline duty as a last resort. The movie even makes a point of showing that they're pretty poorly supplied, having only two crates of (usually rather ubiquitous) panzerfausts left.
It's still a bit of an annoyance, but I'd say the segment works better if you watch it with the perspective that you're seeing a bunch of people with little to no experience facing an unknown obstacle in the middle of the night. Fog of war, and all that. Arguably you could also read it as an act of hubris on the SS-commander's part, a conviction that with their obvious superiority they should be able to just brush aside a single obstacle like that in one swoop by virtue of esprit alone, rather than take the "cowardly" option of circumventing it entirely. They were also under a certain degree of time pressure, as the bulk of the american forces were set to reach that same crossing on the very next day, which would have contributed to that stance.

Elite or no, hundreds of them just running towards a position without even firing was a bit much. It feels like a battle scene from a different movie. In the film's first battle, in the clearing, they really cleverly give you a sense that they don't really know what they're firing at much of the time. They're firing into tree cover or smoke, aiming at muzzle flashes and hoping for the best, and the film captures just how little they actually see.
Then, come the final battle, they're cutting down heavy weapon teams in the dark right as they set up. They seem omniscient. Again, it would be a fine scene, in a different movie.
If it had been in my hands, I would have ended it right after the first charge. They have a moment of triumph, Pitt goes for the ammo, and that's where they'd all get killed. They made a statement, they aimed for a heroic last stand, but at the end of the day it's still 5 guys firing from a static, vulnerable position. It would be in keeping with the tone of the rest of the movie

# ¿ Feb 18, 2015 22:52

Snowman_McK: Jan 31, 2010

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:

That's the point - there's nothing heroic about it. There are no concrete stakes to holding the crossroads, at least no ticking clock that establishes that 'x' will happen if this SS column isn't stopped. From the very beginning of the film, the destruction of the Nazi regime is a foregone conclusion and the entire film is about the bitter end. Think about a scene earlier in the film, as the tank column rolls on and Wardaddy pauses to view the war in heaven, which is a squadron at most of Luftwaffe fighters versus what looks like an armada of Allied warplanes. Why should they be fighting on? Plenty of Germans deserted and surrendered. Fury's a film about war as a supernatural force.

And that's my problem. It ends up feeling like a heroic stand, because it goes on so long and requires so many contrivances to keep going. Even when the main gun fails, and both machine guns are out of bullets all at the same time, they have enough time to reload and keep slaughtering nazis. Their heroic stand works. It's not a pointless gesture in a pointless part of the war, which is what it seemed to be building to. One tank crew kills 300 or so German soldiers. It seems like a scene that couldn't have happened in the same movie where a tank is unexpectedly killed by two child soldiers. Where only a rigid formation and constant communication lets them win the battle in the clearing (which is seriously one of the best battle scenes ever), where a Tiger tank knocks out three American tanks before it's destroyed. It would be a perfect ending if it was about a third the length or so.
Talking back to your point about the planes, yes, we're shown that the American army is tired and not particularly well equipped, but still at an overwhelming advantage against the remnants of the German army. Then a fully equipped, seemingly well motivated regiment pops up, vastly outnumbers the Americans, and still gets slaughtered.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2015 23:10

Snowman_McK: Jan 31, 2010

It's a pity to use a generic cipher/symbol for your main character when you had such a distinctive nutbag in Chris Kyle.

# ¿ Feb 22, 2015 21:46

Snowman_McK: Jan 31, 2010