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I'm not surprised they buy into that poo poo. My best friend is a Navy EOD tech that spent his deployment attached to a SEAL team in Afghanistan. According to him, it was like someone took a bunch of frat bros and spent a lot of money teaching them how to kill people. He said they were really amazing soldiers, but any time they had any downtime they just became loud racist weirdos. Apparently, a lot of them are kind of anti-technology, which struck me as odd. He said one guy didn't even know how to use a computer. Obviously they probably aren't all like that, but I'm certainly not surprised that someone would buy into the fantasy that a Punisher comic book is selling. It's not much different from all the preteen kids religiously buying Call of Duty games wanting to join Delta Force or something "because it's badass." A whole lot of people don't grow out of that phase.
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Jan 23, 2015 19:13
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L-Boned posted:As someone who served over there around the same time that Kyle did, I think some of you are blowing the movie out of proportion. I mean, the movie centers around a guy who won a poo poo ton of medals. What did you expect? You had to know you were going to get your daily serving of patriotism in it. You don't think there's some validity in pointing out the issues with media that is deliberately using revisionist history and emotional manipulation to promote bigotry / jingoism and shore up recruiting quotas? Does the guy having a lot of medals preclude the director from taking the film in a different direction? "Has a bunch of medals" is literally the least compelling thing about Chris Kyle. You've got a pathological liar who wrapped himself in faith and patriotism to the point that he feels no remorse for taking human life. There are a whole lot of ways you could make a movie out of that which doesn't end up with the the weight and nuance of a CoD noscope compilation. Grizzled Patriarch fucked around with this message at 06:52 on Jan 24, 2015 |
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Jan 24, 2015 06:49
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I just can't believe this movie is getting away with such blatant whitewashing of the Iraq war. It tries so hard to sell 9/11 as the catalyst for sending troops into Iraq; Hussein and WMDs aren't mentioned a single time. At least in his autobiography Kyle had the courtesy to lie about finding WMDs. The movie sure does take the time to namedrop Al-Qaeda, though, despite the fact that they never existed in Iraq. I mean, holy poo poo. And people are just eating it up. Yeah, it's "just a movie," but it's a movie that is going to be informing a ton of people's view of history. meristem posted:
I don't there are any movies that are a true mirror to this one. The Deer Hunter, maybe? Platoon and Apocalypse Now do, to a degree, but people still manage to ignore that angle and get all rah-rah about the combat scenes. And maybe Jacob's Ladder, even though it's not really a "war film." Grizzled Patriarch fucked around with this message at 16:56 on Jan 24, 2015 |
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Jan 24, 2015 16:46
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Getting beyond the fact that Kyle himself was a racist (using racist language and bragging about shooting looters from the top of the Astrodome, which the film wisely chose to ignore), the entire movie has a blatantly racist attitude toward everyone that isn't white. Every Iraqi is a terrorist or a terrorist sympathizer. The one character that seems alright ends up being evil all along. The only truly sympathetic Iraqi character in the entire film is the kid that gets used as emotional leverage in a torture scene to further hammer home how savage all the other brown people are. The entire movie is trying to build a bullshit narrative about a white soldier's moral superiority against the backdrop of fighting the insurgents that didn't exist until we started killing Iraqis on their own soil. The Al-Qaeda that this movie is trying to sell to viewers is flat-out fabrication used as a hand-wavey justification for the violence that the film portrays. It's an incredibly reckless portrayal of events in a country where 40% of the population still believes that Iraq had direct involvement in 9/11. The movie is racist because it presents this moral black and white view of the Iraq War were every US soldier is a tragic, noble, humanized figure while every single Iraqi is a nameless terrorist or terrorist supporter. Can you remember a single Iraqi character in this film having a name besides the bad guys? (Hint: they don't get names) quote:"If you see anyone from sixteen to sixty-five and they're male, shoot 'em. Kill every male you see." He doesn't even regard the Iraqis as human beings. And consequently, neither does this film. Grizzled Patriarch fucked around with this message at 19:10 on Jan 24, 2015 |
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Jan 24, 2015 19:04
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SirDrinksAlot posted:I understand that, and I've heard a bit about Chris Kyle. Read my post above for a look at why the movie itself is racist. You could also read the quotes from his autobiography, which lays out exactly what he thought about the Iraqi people. In fact it makes it very clear that he actually was a terrible person! hth Edit: Also, helping veterans how? You mean by lying and pocketing 98% of the proceeds of a book that he claimed would donate 100% of proceeds to veterans? Or by taking a man with diagnosed PTSD to a gun range to "get over it"? Grizzled Patriarch fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Jan 24, 2015 |
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Jan 24, 2015 19:28
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SirDrinksAlot posted:
I am not prior service, but most of my family is. My dad struggled with PTSD after Kuwait, but he somehow managed to get by without calling the people that blew up his Humvee savages and wishing that he could go back and murder a bunch of them in cold blood. Chris Kyle literally wanted to shoot people that were just walking down the street holding Korans. The reason people are telling you to look at his own book is because this movie is nothing but lies. I don't know how you can get much more damning than what he wrote about himself. And I do doubt that he cared about helping veterans (at least less than he cared about himself) because he stole 3 million dollars from them. It's not about turning people into racists. It's about whitewashing history. This movie tries to play off the Iraq war as a response to 9/11 and a fight against Al-Qaeda. The fact that they are getting away with that a scant decade after the fact is horrifying. The way the film goes out of its way to dehumanize and vilify every Iraqi character except the one they use to emotionally manipulate the audience is disgusting and racist. A lot of people aren't informed enough about the Iraq War to know that what this film is depicting is pure fantasy. I don't think anyone is going to come out of theaters magically transformed into racists, but they may very well come out as yet another person who thinks Iraq had something to do with 9/11 and that the loss of life there is now justified. You've yet to provide any sort of counter-argument aside from "He was probably an okay guy," which is demonstrably false. edit: And this is on top of the fact that the movie is just tepid and forgettable. The fact that Cooper got an Oscar nod for the incredible feat of eating some burgers and putting on a Texas accent is mindboggling. Grizzled Patriarch fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Jan 24, 2015 |
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Jan 24, 2015 20:26
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SirDrinksAlot posted:What other counter argument do I have other than my opinions on the movie and my own personal experiences overseas? I guess I'm kind of confused as to your argument. That the movie isn't all that bad? I don't see how it's possible to claim that the depiction of Iraqi characters in this film isn't problematic. Like I said, can you think of a single Iraqi character that had a name, aside from the evil caricatures? They don't get names because they aren't people. The film treats them like props. Not a single one of them gets the same level of depth as secondary and sometimes even tertiary white characters. Whether Chris Kyle and combat forces as a whole are trained to dehumanize the enemy is one thing, but that doesn't justify the film doing it. It's also troubling that the dehumanization extends to women and children, even outside of the opening scene. And while I agree with you i/r/t drone strikes, etc., atrocities aren't mutually exclusive. Trying to justify war with Iraq through tenuous links with 9/11 isn't "ignorant" unless you think every single person involved in the making of this film somehow didn't know any better. What this film is doing is very much a deliberate, willful act of historical revisionism, and that is very dangerous. Trying to sugarcoat an unjustified war is socially and morally irresponsible, especially when most of the audience were probably children during the events of this film and couldn't have possibly formed an educated opinion on it at the time. Why do you think so many people think Iraq was involved in 9/11? A large part of it comes from the media (including news outlets) selling that narrative, or at least tacitly allowing others to. Just because some people will think what they want to think and gleefully take all of their opinions from talking heads without a moment of reflection doesn't mean it's ethical to push potentially harmful lies on them as the truth. Grizzled Patriarch fucked around with this message at 21:01 on Jan 24, 2015 |
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Jan 24, 2015 20:58
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astupiddvdcase posted:I love how people of certain political leaning loves to bash all the movies with "liberal agendas about slavery" etc. etc. (not that oscar baiting films don't raise my eyebrows) and now they can't handle people being up in arms about American Sniper lol. He, really, really wasn't a nice guy.
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Jan 25, 2015 03:33
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Yeah, a movie can have lovely politics and still be a well-made film. Hell, I've enjoyed movies that I completely disagreed with on an intellectual / ethical level. American Sniper is just artistically bankrupt.
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Jan 25, 2015 04:18
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Dissapointed Owl posted:When I heard they were going to adapt that book I was kinda excited. Cut out the verifiable bullshit, ask and examine some interesting questions regarding the conflict (seriously, you can approach this poo poo in so many interesting ways), take a good look at this man, hell, even paint him as another victim of war yet held up as a symbol even though he's pretty goddamn broken. His death is a title card at the very end of the movie that somehow manages to be mildly condescending toward the PTSD-suffering veteran that he decided to take to a range. Grizzled Patriarch fucked around with this message at 06:48 on Jan 25, 2015 |
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Jan 25, 2015 06:44
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At first I was wondering how the same person who made Letters from Iwo Jima created this film, but now I wonder how the person that made this film managed to make Letters from Iwo Jima.
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Jan 25, 2015 06:48
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Charlz Guybon posted:Al-qaeda was not in Iraq before the war, however it moved in during the power vacuum and AQI is the group that ISIS emerged from. Eh, yes and no. "Al-Qaeda in Iraq" got used as a blanket term for several different groups of Sunni insurgents, Salafi Islamists, and Mujaheddin. Calling it AQI implies that they were part of some highly-organized, globe-spanning group with a centralized power structure, and that just wasn't the case. The closest it got was after the formation of the Mujaheddin Shura Council as an attempt to unify the different Sunni insurgent groups, but that wasn't until after the events portrayed in American Sniper. It's also kind of disingenuous since it's an obvious attempt to make people subconsciously link them all to 9/11, when the majority of AQ affiliates have explicitly expressed no interest in attacking the West. Since the 80s, AQ's primary goal has always been pushing foreign occupational forces out of Islamic borders, so using Al-Qaeda as a catchall term has some very specific connotations that don't necessarily apply to every group that gets lumped in with AQ. Along the same lines, Jabhat al-Nusra got called "Al-Qaeda in Syria" until they merged into ISIS, despite the fact that their interests lay exclusively in overthrowing Assad. In the context of the film, they push this even farther. Real-life Kyle joined up after the 1998 embassy bombings, but the film goes out of its way to show him joining up as a direct response to 9/11. It also skips over his initial deployment entirely (the one where he claims to have found WMDs) and fast-forwards to looking for Al-Zarqawi. It's interesting, because the possibility of Al-Zarqawi being in Iraq got used as one of the justifications for invasion in the first place, despite internal Pentagon statements acknowledging that Hussein had no ties whatsoever to Al-Qaeda. The film very clearly wants to hammer in 9/11 as the backdrop / justification for everything that happens on screen.
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Jan 25, 2015 17:23
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Eb posted:Great movie, definitely deserves the Oscar nomination for best picture. I refuse to believe that anyone who has seen more than one movie that is up for BP could possibly think this film deserves a Best Picture nod. Beyond the lovely politics, it's a terrible movie. All the characters are cartoonish caricatures, the entire plot boils down to "Enemy at the Gates, but worse" (and being better than EatG is not a high bar to begin with), and everything from the cinematography to the score to the dialogue is limp and forgettable. Also, ahaha, in what world is "Go America" a refreshing stance in a war film? Are you forgetting Lone Survivor, Zero Dark Thirty, Act of Valor, Hurt Locker, not to mention the small-scale stuff like Jarhead 2. I hate the argument that "it's only entertainment" because that implies that media has no impact on its audience beyond temporary distraction. There are a hell of a lot of people that are going to have their perception of history (and Chris Kyle) colored by this film's blatant revisionism. There should absolutely be some degree of accountability involved when you are selling socially irresponsible propaganda as "based on the True Story (tm)!" Instead it gets to hide behind a veneer of "art" despite the utter lack of artistry in any facet of the film.
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Jan 26, 2015 00:01
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teagone posted:That's what makes it awesome. "If you see anyone from sixteen to sixty-five and they're male, shoot 'em. Kill every male you see." “I only wish I had killed more." “I loved what I did … It was fun. I had the time of my life.” “I don’t shoot people with Korans – I’d like to, but I don’t.” All directly from his autobiography.
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Jan 26, 2015 00:33
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teagone posted:Dude was nuts, but I don't see him calling an entire ethnic group savages. The guy was a SEAL too. Aren't all SEAL operators alpha male types who joined the armed forces to just straight up kill? Only difference is Kyle got some publicity. I mean, if you want the full context you kind of have to read the book for yourself. It's very clear from his writing that he had zero qualms about killing and thought that he was doing God's work. He does use the term "savages" several times throughout the book, but people argue that he's only referring to enemy combatants. There isn't much point arguing either way since he doesn't clarify, and what you believe is probably going to end up depending on how you view Kyle. I think it's pretty safe to assume that he had a pretty drat bigoted view of the Iraqi people, considering he flat-out admitted (as quoted above) that he wanted to shoot people that were walking down the street with Korans in their hands, which doesn't really need any additional context to roundly condemn. There is one scene in the book where he talks about not wanting to shoot a kid, but that's literally the only time he seems to consider an Iraqi to be an actual human being. And no, that is not what all SEALs are. It is, in fact, an attitude that they specifically try to screen out. Whether they are successful or not is another matter. edit: Which is all to say, if "He's terrible, but maybe not that terrible" is the best defense that can be mustered, maybe trying to sell him as a good ol' All-American hero is a questionable decision, at best. Grizzled Patriarch fucked around with this message at 01:16 on Jan 26, 2015 |
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Jan 26, 2015 01:12
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mugrim posted:You should read the book before you say those statements have been taken out of context. His feelings on killing muslims and iraqis are made boldly apparent in his book. There's no dog whistle involved, he straight up says he loves killing them. He literally had a red Crusader's cross tattooed on his arm, for anyone who doubts this.
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Jan 26, 2015 01:47
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Eb posted:For me, and I suspect most people, movies are mainly just entertainment. Filmmakers should not be required to only make "socially responsible" movies that educate the masses. You don't think that films can be used as tools? That the media has no influence on society's perception of history? There absolutely is a responsibility involved when you are making a film like this. It's one thing to make a movie where the violence is portrayed against a fictional backdrop. Of course you aren't going to eliminate the politics in film, and I don't advocate that. There is absolutely a place for films that I (and anyone else) disagree with. The problem here is that there is no fictional backdrop. You don't get to use a real-life conflict with real-life people, call it a "True Story," and then whitewash history and deliberately lie / mislead the audience. If you don't think there ought to be any accountability involved, I don't know what to tell you. When a film crosses the line into deliberate propaganda, there are additional considerations at play. Make a movie like Dredd if you want to have a popcorn action flick. Don't push a racist piece of revisionist history set against a decade-old conflict that the average U.S. citizen is infamously loving ignorant about. Chris Kyle's portrayal bothers me because it's a flat-out lie (and yes, an autobiography is about as close to "absolute truth" in source material as you can get), but the film selling Iraq as a justified conflict stemming from the events of 9/11 is the real issue I have with at the end of the day. And yes, art is subjective, who cares. If you think this film is well-made, you have poor taste or haven't been exposed to better films. Everything about it is cliche and bland. Some people are going to disagree of course, but in this case I'll happily plant my flag on the same hill as every professional film critic with any credibility. Grizzled Patriarch fucked around with this message at 02:09 on Jan 26, 2015 |
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Jan 26, 2015 02:07
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Eb posted:So that was just a drunken tall tale? You guys made it seem like he devoted an entire chapter of his book to it. Nobody said that. In fact, as people pointed out, it's almost assuredly bullshit (since, you know, he was a virulent liar). The issue is that he thinks bragging about murdering "looters" in cold blood without any form of due process makes for a badass bar story. quote:So basically you'd be fine with the movie if they had removed the 10 second scene of Chris seeing a plane ram the WTC? That isn't the only way they try to push the 9/11 narrative, but even if they removed that, it's still a deeply racist film that glorifies the idea of of the noble, professional soldier in black in white terms in the context of a war that was waged under false pretenses. Lionizing Kyle while sweeping 150,000 dead Iraqi civilians under the rug (except for the ones that make good cartoon villains!) is pretty lovely, dude. edit: And, you know, it would still be a boring, poorly-shot and poorly-structured movie. Grizzled Patriarch fucked around with this message at 02:25 on Jan 26, 2015 |
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Jan 26, 2015 02:19
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teagone posted:The movie was meh and I couldn't register any tone throughout most of it, but I wouldn't say it was poorly shot. I thought it was actually a pretty good looking film, from a cinematography perspective. I'd call the cinematography adequate / formulaic. There weren't any truly great shots and only a few outright bad ones, which is about par for the course. The film's structure, pacing, and characterization are whacked, though, and as a war film it really just ends up being a less tense version of Enemy at the Gates. Which is funny given all the book chat, since the entire rival sniper that the movie focuses on was pulled from a single line in the book that mentioned a rumor about an ex-Olympic sharpshooter that Kyle never encountered. mugrim posted:
Not to mention that this is a "code" that allows for the killing of US citizens on US soil without due process for the heinous crime of stealing consumer goods. Grizzled Patriarch fucked around with this message at 02:42 on Jan 26, 2015 |
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Jan 26, 2015 02:37
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The tensest moment of the entire film is the very first scene, and it even fucks that up with a smash-cut flashback. Making the rival sniper such a big part of the film is also completely bizarre, given that it's impossible to make that premise tense unless you somehow never turned on the news / opened a paper in the months after his death and the months leading up to this film's release. Then his death is handled with a title card like it's a show on TLC. It's all just so amateurish. Grizzled Patriarch fucked around with this message at 03:05 on Jan 26, 2015 |
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Jan 26, 2015 03:02
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Think about this - the way the "trailer scene" plays out in the actual film feels way more like a trailer for another, stupider movie. Can you name another movie like that, that would make you think "wow, they really hosed up the quiet tension from the trailer"? It's like the opposite of all those tense slow-burn films that pack all the action into their trailers.
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Jan 26, 2015 03:06
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The fact that so many better films got snubbed for a BP nod in favor of American Sniper is just mindblowing.
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Jan 26, 2015 03:11
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mugrim posted:Even the trailer put me off a bit initially. The phrase "They fry you if you're wrong" is completely untrue and anyone who has an ounce of military history/engagement knowledge knows it. The last military execution was about half a century ago. It also sinks any emotional weight the scene could have by making it seem like he's more worried about breaking ROE than he is about killing an innocent. It's kind of telling that the film cuts to hunting deer instead of depicting any aftermath of his decision to pull the trigger (which is, you know, what makes being a sniper so potentially traumatic in the first place)
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Jan 26, 2015 03:22
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zVxTeflon posted:Lol where do you people get this crap? Directly from his autobiography, where he is discussing how lax ROE is: “If you see anyone from about sixteen to sixty-five and they’re male, shoot ‘em. Kill every male you see.” edit: Which sounds about right, considering his claimed kill count is more than twice as high as the deadliest snipers in Vietnam. Maybe it's not really a big deal, but I always thought it was kind of odd how many more kills he had than anyone else in Iraq or Afghanistan. Maybe his quote above is full of poo poo, he certainly has no qualms about lying. But his kill count would certainly make more sense if half of the Iraqi population was considered a legitimate target. Grizzled Patriarch fucked around with this message at 05:48 on Jan 26, 2015 |
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Jan 26, 2015 05:42
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If you are shooting people based solely on their age and gender rather than the fact that they pose an identifiable risk to coalition forces, then yes, that probably qualifies as a war crime. Certainly not every Iraqi male between 16-65 was an enemy combatant.
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Jan 26, 2015 05:51
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I think even the old fudds calling the shots for the AAs realize that they would lose every last ounce of legitimacy if this movie wins Best Picture. There's literally no way to justify it on its merits as a film, and I can't see a voting majority being in line with the agenda it promotes either. The backlash would probably be more severe than it was for Crash and Shakespeare in Love, yes, though at least SiL had some redeeming qualities. edit: Also, someone mentioned a while back that making all these truckloads of money might actually hurt its chances of winning more than help it, but I don't know enough about the award system to know whether that's true or not. Grizzled Patriarch fucked around with this message at 08:22 on Jan 26, 2015 |
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Jan 26, 2015 08:19
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Charlz Guybon posted:Has a 72 on metacritic and 73% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes (83% among top critics, which is unusual for a movie to have a higher percentage among them). Here's a good one that sums up a lot of the film's artistic flaws: http://badassdigest.com/2014/12/09/american-sniper-movie-review-nobody-tries-less-than-clint/ Rolling Stone also ran a good one. I'll find some more when I get home. Conversely, can you find a critic that has anything good to say about the film artistically? A lot of the reviews are like 75% bashing the politics and 25% bashing the actual filmmaking (which is understandable), but come on dude. There's no way you can watch this movie and hold it up as an example of quality. It has one tense scene in the entire loving movie (the very first scene) that they botch with a terrible smash-cut flashback. That's the kind of poo poo you get laughed at for in film schools. (And it's also shamelessly stolen from Enemy at the Gates, another bad sniper film). The most that can be said for the cinematography is "well, I could tell what was going on the whole time, I guess." The characters are cardboard cutouts. The dialogue is stilted and eye-rolling. The central conflict of the film (the stupid sniper rivalry) has no tension because everyone who pays even the barest attention to news and the world around them knew that Chris Kyle didn't die in Iraq. And that's ignoring the fact that we've already seen that same cliche bullshit in literally every single war movie that has ever featured a sniper. They handle his actual death, which should have been one of the most tense and important parts of the story, with a TLC reality show-style title card. If you are defending this film's artistry, you are loving blind. It was one of the most bland, half-cooked, by-the-numbers films of the year.
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Jan 26, 2015 18:26
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There have actually been entire pages of this thread worth of people taking detailed looks at why the film itself is poo poo. The politics are just poo poo icing. If you want to watch a bunch of action scenes about snipers, go watch Enemy at the Gates. It's not really a great film or anything, but it has a better cast, better pacing, some actual attention paid to cinematography, etc. American Sniper basically ripped off 80% of that movie and stuck an American coat of paint on it anyway (including the smash-cut hunting flashback and using a child for shameless emotional leverage). Kind of weird how many people don't see an issue with American Sniper being treated like an action movie in the first place, but whatever. It's ok to admit that you enjoyed watching a bad movie.
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Jan 27, 2015 17:48
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*Clint Eastwood nudges 150,000 dead Iraqi civilians under a comically small oriental rug with his foot*
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Jan 27, 2015 18:45
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Yep, the Germans offer terms of surrender and then the Russian officers do their "not one step back" speech and machine-gun their own retreating men. There's also a scene in the very beginning where an officer shoots one of his men for jumping off of the troop transport ship after a Stuka attack. It's a flawed movie, but it at least acknowledges that war isn't black and white - and that's coming from a conflict with a hell of a lot more justification behind it than Iraq.
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Jan 27, 2015 19:42
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Nope. My favorite part is how he moves the toy baby arm with his thumb. edit: beaten One of the CoD games has a whole section where you wake up in Stalingrad under a pile of bodies and go on to have a sniper duel, and the entire level design is basically just shots from Enemy at the Gates.
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Jan 27, 2015 20:04
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Yeah. It was apparently something he'd done before, too. Pretty tragic all around, though of course all you ever hear about is the death of No. 1 Hero Chris Kyle, and not the friend that was also killed or the broken vet who is now almost assuredly going to spend the rest of his life in prison rather than receiving treatment from an actual professional. edit: Cooper was the high point of the film by far, though I definitely feel like there are other actors that could have done a better job. It certainly wasn't an Oscar-worthy performance. He's gotten pretty good at acting with his eyes, but the rest of him still feels a bit wooden. Maybe he just needs some better scripts. Grizzled Patriarch fucked around with this message at 04:27 on Jan 29, 2015 |
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Jan 29, 2015 04:24
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It's pretty much the same take as Team America: World Police, but unironic.
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Jan 29, 2015 19:37
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Crain posted:Holy poo poo, what a terrible article. Chris Kyle also had a beard, so they should be ecstatic about one secret Muslim murdering another!
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Feb 3, 2015 17:28
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Well I mean everything relating to Kyle's PTSD comes from his wife - it isn't mentioned a single time in the book. They didn't hew to the book because the only people an accurate portrayal of Kyle would appeal to aren't the target for propagandist film because they're already swimming in the kool-aid. Sanding down the edges and reframing the narrative are very deliberate choices meant to appeal to the more moderate / "middle of the road" crowd. The film presents a very puerile plastic-army-men-in-the-backyard view of the conflict because it means the audience doesn't have to put in any work to interpret what's on the screen. It's Chris Kyle fan fiction. Generally speaking, propaganda is a war of attrition - the majority of moviegoers probably aren't going to have their minds changed by a single film with regards to American involvement in Iraq, but push the same narrative on them over and over across an extended period of time and well...
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Feb 5, 2015 18:26
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Yeah, there's just not much to say about it. It's a boring, amateurish, paint-by-numbers film with a tin ear and a blind eye. Cooper's performance is the only thing that ever rises above the soaring heights of "mediocre" and even that is so hamstrung by everything else that it doesn't justify sitting through the film. Like holy poo poo, if you are going to make a blatant piece of propaganda, at least pull a Battleship Potemkin and make it aesthetically interesting.
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Feb 6, 2015 08:52
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The problem is, that's a boring loving message for a war film. It's the same thing that every US war film says, which definitely does have something to do with the fact that US civilians aren't suffering mass casualties. You can certainly make a great war film that doesn't focus on the soldiers (Come and See, Empire of the Sun, Schindler's List). Yes, PTSD is terrible. But when you weigh having a freakout in the cereal aisle vs. having entire bloodlines wiped out, whole cities bombed to rubble, hundreds of thousands dead and maimed, trying to scratch out a living in an apocalyptic hellscape, you're not going to convince me that that the former is the "real" horror of war. Painting the traumatic experiences of volunteer servicemen and women as the "worst thing about war," as Eastwood claims, is never going to make for an effective anti-war film, because 99% of the population is completely and utterly insulated from that experience. Doubly so when the film goes out of its way to dehumanize and vilify the Iraqi civilians. The film's message becomes a platitude. Everyone can nod their heads and agree that PTSD is tragic, and war is bad, but that's where the introspection ends. It doesn't contribute any more towards ending war than saying "cancer is bad" contributes to curing cancer. And on top of all that, this film doesn't even do a good job of portraying how lovely PTSD is. It's not even a competent delivery system for the tapioca pudding version of anti-war sentiment.
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Feb 7, 2015 00:51
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Yeah I think you need to elaborate on that one.
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Feb 7, 2015 01:19
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Cole posted:I'm welcome to criticism. Sometimes criticism is the only way to let people know they are hosed up. Chris Kyle never got that (like I said, though, I've only read biographical information and not his actual book). Instead, he got propped up as a hero because of his kill count, and everything negative about him got put to the wayside. That is actually a very fundamentally flawed part of our military. Exposing it just isn't part of this movie because that wasn't the movie's objective. At the end of the day it's still Hollywood, and an anti-troop movie wouldn't make a studio much money right now. The movie shows how war breaks someone down, but, and I hate using this trope, unless you've seen it for yourself or lived it, you may not get that point. I didn't serve, but I was raised by a father suffering from PTSD and I've had to deal with a cousin attempting suicide after coming back from his last deployment. The way this film treats PTSD feels like an afterthought (which is probably is, since Kyle makes no mention of it whatsoever in his book). It almost feels predatory, if that makes sense, like the film is using PTSD as a shield to deflect any criticism of the deeper underlying issues that the film suffers from. Nobody is denying that this film may resonate with some vets, but that doesn't make it an effective anti-war film. In fact, as I mentioned earlier, it really makes it a pretty weak one because the people that you actually need to communicate an anti-war message to are the civilians, not the people that have been there and experienced it firsthand. The people that have been there and seen combat understand how terrible war is (well, except for people like Kyle, I guess), so this film is just preaching to the choir. 99% of the population is insulated from the experiences of a soldier and will never be able to relate to it no matter how well-made your film is. Which is why the overwhelming majority of war films fail to convey any actual anti-war sentiment in a way that might effect change. Almost every war film I can think of says the same thing - the only difference is the set dressing. Every contemporary American film involving Iraq / Afghanistan "sheds light on PTSD." I'm pretty sure there is not a single American over the age of 10 who doesn't realize PTSD sucks. American Sniper is a amateurish rehash of any already tired statement that inherently will not resonate with the overwhelming majority of the audience. If the only anti-war message that ever gets any traction is that being a soldier can really gently caress you up, then 99% of the population will go on with their days and say "welp, good thing I wasn't planning on enlisting, I guess" while the 1% that have served will nod their heads and go "yeah, that's true." It's a giant circular holding pattern. This film deserves flak because it's not only doing that, but its doing it while being very disingenuous. It completely fabricates Kyle's character, has a blatantly racist attitude towards the Iraqis (both civilian and insurgent), makes some really sketchy connections between 9/11 and Iraq both as a casus belli and as the reason Kyle joins up (it wasn't) and contributes more to the mythology of the tragically noble warrior than it does to any anti-war perspective. Grizzled Patriarch fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Feb 7, 2015 |
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Feb 7, 2015 19:13
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 12:05 |
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For the sake of argument I'm willing to believe that Eastwood didn't deliberately set out to make a pro-war film, but at the very least he fell into the trap of glorifying the noble soldier and handwaving away the consequences that war has on a civilian population, which is certainly not a flaw unique to this film. I mean, it's probably an unpopular opinion, but I think Hurt Locker has a lot of the same problems as this film does, it's just not quite as overt and the film itself is actually well-crafted. I think Eastwood's (and Kyle's) personal politics are much more vile though, so that on top of of everything else, American Sniper is pushing a pretty hosed up agenda. Honestly it gets to the point where it's hard to disentangle the concept of "pro-war," since that's a pretty loaded term. Like I think the film makes a very deliberate attempt to whitewash US involvement in Iraq and provide some kind of retrospective justification for it, partially by hiding behind the troops (which is pretty despicable and wildly irresponsible, imo), but I don't think that the film is saying "war is good." So I don't know if it's necessarily fair to call it pro-war, but it's also not anti-war - at best it pays shallow lip service to the safest, most trite antiwar statement possible. It might just be a lovely movie with ugly revisionist politics.
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Feb 7, 2015 19:43
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