American Sniper: Pt. 1
Feb. 7th, 2015 09:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyHOLD ON TO YOUR COWBOY HATS AND AMERICAN FLAGS. LADIES, GENTLEMEN, THOSE OUTSIDE THE GENDER BINARY, AND AMORPHOUS GAS ENTITIES…
I announce the triumphant return of the CHEATSHEET OF FREEDOM. And it’s the EXTRA FREEDOM EDITION.
(For those of you who aren’t familiar with this—er—feature of my little blog, it’s where I watch bad movies—and occasionally good ones—so you don’t have to.)
Our featured movie is American Sniper, starring Bradley Cooper and directed by Clint Eastwood. Now, when this movie was released, I had zero interest in seeing it because everything, from the casting to the posters to the title itself, sounded dead boring. (Spoiler: I was right.) However, since noted film critic Sarah Palin and her army of cinematic connoisseurs started shitting up the internet with the assertion that if you didn’t like this movie, the terrorists win, my curiosity was piqued and I had to know what the fuss was about. So I downloaded an illegal torrent (obviously, I am not going to pay money to see this) and invited a few folks over to suffer with me.
Seth Rogen infamously compared this movie to Stolz der Nation, the fake propaganda film featured in Tarantino’s masterpiece Inglourious Basterds. (Then had to double back on his statement and praise the film, because freedom of speech.) This is an unfair comparison. Stolz der Nation, from what we see of it, looks like the kind of film someone might actually want to watch. American Sniper is not.
Folks, there is absolutely nothing good about this movie. Nothing. It has no redeeming value. I have had students in my class shit out better movies than this. I’m not saying that it’s a bad movie because it’s politically abhorrent, though it is. It is politically bad. But this is tangential to the point. It’s a bad movie on every possible level and Eastwood should know better.
But before I get into why, let’s have a brief digression into common tropes and audience expectations in war movies. To get this out of the way, war movies are not my favourite thing. I have issues around telling similar-looking people apart, so if all of your characters are crew-cut, young white men in uniforms, I’m immediately going to hit an obstacle. (In this movie, for example, I was unclear as to the names of any of the characters and had to look them up on IMDb, and asked my friends several times which crew-cut white guy was which.) This said, there are a lot of good war movies, most of which I’ve watched, so I do know what I’m talking about here.
Nor does every war movie need to be Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket. (But if a movie is nominated for an Oscar, I’m going to hold it to somewhere around that standard.) Still, this doesn’t even hold up to the standard of regular, run-of-the-mill war movies, and here’s why:
There is a certain pattern we expect from an average, Hollywood, disposable war movie. Hero gets recruited or drafted into a war. There’s a training montage, wherein he is shit and treated like shit by his CO. Hero bonds with his unit. Hero has some sort of skill (like having hunted as a kid so he’s a good shot) that makes him valuable. Hero goes off to war, and it’s not what he expected. Hero’s sidekick looks at a picture of his wife or girlfriend back in Iowa and remarks that he gets to see her in three weeks. Hero’s sidekick dies. Hero either survives or everyone dies and it’s a commentary on the pointlessness of war. This movie, technically speaking, has some of these notes, but manages to strike them in precisely the wrong way.
The scene with the picture of the wife/girlfriend is cliché and heavy-handed, but it exists for a reason. We know what’s going to happen to that guy. It’s there for audience identification, to remind us of the humanity of the guys in uniform. Same with the training montage and the hero being told he’s shit; we require these low points in order to build sympathy and dramatic interest. Even though the hero is running around killing people in an exotic locale, he dreams of a simple life and in his heart he is a regular dude just like us.
American Sniper takes a very different approach. Eastwood does not want you to identify with the protagonist or any of the secondary characters. In the ideology of this film, soldiers are not, in fact, just like us. They are literally a different breed of humanity, and you cannot understand them because you are not currently at war. You are a sheep, not a sheepdog. At least 75% of the movie is other characters telling Chris Kyle that he is awesome and not to blame for anything bad that happens. 1% of the movie is people underestimating him or telling him that he’s shit. He does not fuck up (except a bit at the end, but we’ll get to this). He needs no character arc, because he is not a character. It’s kind of an interesting take in that it flies in the face of every convention of Western cinema to the point that the movie is almost unrecognizable as a movie, but unfortunately it does not work as an entertaining movie-going experience.
But on with the review. I couldn’t watch this alone, so I invited some friends over. They insisted on pseudonyms because they know I have a pseudonym, so meet Fistula Dulles, Merrick A. Hater, and Ginger Baker. Not their real names. We ordered a massive quantity of Hakka food and I’d stocked the fridge with Innis and Gunn*. Merrick doesn’t drink so he had to watch the whole thing sober. Anyway, with the constitution of true heroes and suitable libations at hand, we sat down and watched American Sniper so that you don’t have to.
Spoilers for the entire movie. Not like you should watch this movie.
Our movie begins with an ominous call to prayer—reminding you that Muslims are scary and inscrutable—and the sound of tanks driving over shit.
Our hero, Chris Kyle, a.k.a., THE LEGEND, is sniping on a roof with a wisecracking sidekick. To establish the seriousness of the stakes, the wisecracking sidekick declares that even the dirt tastes like dogshit. THE LEGEND asks how he would know. This is what passes for humour in this movie, and unfortunately, there’s a lot of it.
Fistula: GRITTY REALISM!!
Ginger: I don’t get why people don’t like these guys.
Ginger: That guy deserves to die just for the outfit.
THE LEGEND debates whether he should kill the pretty lady and the cute little kid. Wisecracking sidekick opines that “they” will “fry [his] ass” if he makes the wrong call.
Sabs: NO THEY WOULD NOT FRY YOUR ASS IF YOU WERE WRONG. THEY LITERALLY NEVER DO THAT.
Merrick: Terrorists are such bad parents.
Sabs: That’s the difference between them and us.
Just as THE LEGEND is about to shoot the kid (who has a very obvious grenade), we cut to the all-important backstory:
Baby THE LEGEND killing a deer with his father, which is exactly like killing a woman and child in a country your country has invaded under false pretences.
Baby THE LEGEND is the kind of kid who loves his father and calls him “sir.”
Baby THE LEGEND pays close attention in church, which is significant because the sermon is about how mere humans cannot possibly see with God’s eyes or know his mysterious plan. See, American snipers are just like God in that way. It’s that subtle.
Baby THE LEGEND pulls a Bible out of the pew and stuffs it in his pocket right in front of his family.
Ginger: Did he just boost the fuckin’ Bible? That’s like the first page. Thou shalt not steal.
Papa THE LEGEND voiceovers a lecture to his sons about how there are three strains of humanity: sheep (who are pussies), wolves (who eat pussy, but not in a good way) and sheepdogs (who aren’t pussies) while a really fat kid on the playground beats up baby THE LEGEND’S little brother and baby THE LEGEND beats up the fat kid. Papa THE LEGEND threatens to whup his kids’ asses if they turn into wolves. The boys are all, “SIR YES SIR.”
For the rest of the movie, you have permission to picture this:
every time THE LEGEND appears on screen.
Ginger: Very good, my sons are not pussies.
Ma THE LEGEND gets one line, by the way. There are only two other women in this entire movie who get more than one speaking line or so, and one of those is reading a letter written by a man. Ma THE LEGEND just sits there and lets her gigantic glasses do the talking, the way a woman should.
This is the most manly movie that ever manlied. It is so manly that, as I type this review, I can feel hair growing on balls that weren’t even there before.
Grown-up THE LEGEND is now a rodeo cowboy. Apparently rodeos happen in the middle of the night. Are rodeos a night thing? I don’t know anything about rodeos.
There is dialogue between THE LEGEND and his little brother, but all of the characters in this movie are less comprehensible than the guys in True Detective. The difference was that in True Detective, I was interested enough to strain to make out what Matthew McConaughey was saying even though he sounded like he was speaking through a mouthful of marbles (no offence to Texans but y’all are really difficult to understand).
I’m pretty sure the dialogue is as follows:
“AW SHUCKS SIR”
“SIR MA’AM SIR SHUCKS”
“AMERICUH!”
But I’m going to pretend they’re saying:
“I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself - we are creatures that should not exist by natural law... We are things that labour under the illusion of having a self, that accretion of sensory experience and feelings, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody... I think the honourable thing for our species to do is to deny our programming. Stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction—one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.”
Man, that’s a great monologue. Why am I not watching that?
THE LEGEND walks in on his girlfriend cheating on him. She’s all, “I do this to get attention.”
Also, apparently THE LEGEND is not so legendary in bed. He kicks the girlfriend out and then he and his brother have a good laugh.
As THE LEGEND and his little brother discuss whether or not it is awesome to be a midnight cowboy, the TV drops a load of convenient exposition:
The US embassy in Tanzania has just been bombed by unknown extremists. AMERICA IS AT WAR and Our Hero suddenly has a sense of purpose beyond weird midnight rodeos.
THE LEGEND is so touched by this horrific scene that he almost shows an emotion. He breathes heavily and fumes, “Look what they did to us.”
THE LEGEND wastes no time in enlisting.
Sailor boy determines that THE LEGEND is sufficiently patriotic and likes to fight, so decides that he should be a SEAL and explains what it stands for.
Ginger: Is this real? Do they have pamphlets on how to be a SEAL?
Drill sergeants spray the recruits with water and shout barely comprehensible abuse at them. It’s manly. It’s wet. It’s borderline homoerotic.
Ginger: Beats the fuck out of McDonalds. Barely.
Merrick: Love at first sight!
Sabs: I’d really like the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket right now.
Fistula: Or Lou Gossett Jr.
Forget what I said about borderline. I think they're actually doing a human centipede in this scene.
All other team-building training montages have been deemed insufficiently manly. These guys are so manly that they use each other for dart boards and don’t even flinch.
This would be the Meet Cute portion of the movie, wherein THE LEGEND meets a girl that IMDb tells me is named Taya. She hangs around in Navy SEAL bars even though she does not seem to care for the military and just wants to be left alone. He charms her by being slightly less skeevy than another, married, Navy SEAL, and opines that it is her leather pants that are making all the men hit on her. So manly! So sensitive!
He challenges her to a game of Truth or Drink. I wish I were drinking more than I am right now.
Ginger: This is classic predatory behaviour.
Taya calls THE LEGEND arrogant, self-centred, lying cheaters. He says he’ll lay down his life for his country and calls her ma’am a lot.
Fistula: Who’s scruffy looking?
Being a lady with a tiny lady mind, she has no idea of the MEANING OF SACRIFICE so he just buys her more drinks and is patriotic.
Ginger: That’s all a man has to do. Ply her with drinks and tell her she’s pretty. Courtship done! Now she’s pukin’.
Sabs: I’m pukin’.
Back to the part of the film that people care about. The recruits target shoot. Mindfully. The drill sergeant monologues about holding your breath.
Merrick: Zen and the Art of Sniping.
There's a clumsy parallel between THE LEGEND learning to be a sniper and THE LEGEND courting Taya, who is the kind of lady who sits thoughtfully on a tasteful couch, wearing makeup, and reading magazines (she’s not one of those intellectual types who reads books). He calls and leaves her a bunch of messages and is basically stalkery. These scenes are juxtaposed with firing range scenes because the gun is his penis.
Sabs: Is this the Meet Cute bit?
She goes for it.
Taya: Ever think about what happens when there’s a real person on the other end of the gun?
THE LEGEND: Aww shucks. Shucks. Aww. Shucks.
The gravitas of this conversation is hampered somewhat by the presence of a giant stuffed bear on THE LEGEND’S shoulders.
They do the sex.
PENIS! I mean snake. Anyway, training montage complete. And courtship montage complete. It’s a two-fer and now it's out of the way.
A second plane flies into what is at this point still a very thin plot.
Sienna Miller’s terrible acting in this scene cannot be overstated. She’s bad throughout the movie, but it’s particularly apparent here. She’s like, “CHRIS! OH NO!” in this utterly flat tone that made us all laugh.
While we’re on the topic of tragic loss, what happened to Bradley Cooper’s neck?
Anyway, he stares broodingly at the TV, then broodingly into his gun. I guess that scene is supposed to humanize him but he only has one facial expression, which is staring off into the distance, so it doesn’t quite work.
Taya becomes MRS. THE LEGEND. They dance to predictably bland music. He has a weird green patch on his neck that is never explained. Well, maybe it is, but I honestly can’t understand the mumbly delivery.
The Marines are STOKED to be going to war.
Ginger: Let’s go kill some Ay-RABS.
Merrick: Or whoever.
Everyone: FUCK YEAH!
TOUR 1.
OKAY GOOD we’re back in Fallujah, half an hour into the movie. This bland white people romance was really getting to me.
On to the exposition part of the story. There’s a bunch of military strategy that is nearly as dull as the EPIC COURTSHIP OF THE LEGEND AND MRS THE LEGEND. Basically, Fallujah has been evacuated of civilians (no mention of white phosphorus, of course) and so any military-age male that the soldiers encounter is part of Al Qaeda in Iraq there to kill good honest ‘MURRCANS. Not for any other reason like the fact that they live there. It’s convenient though because they have license to just shoot anyone they encounter.
Oh yes, and THE LEGEND has grown a BEARD OF SERIOUS BUSINESS. GRITTY!
Most shots in the movie look something like this. Note the manly poses and cheap post-production. The biggest disappointment with this movie is that I thought that the cinematography would at least be good. I mean, you have a war zone and Clint Eastwood directing; this should not be hard. But the movie looks like shit in addition to being shit.
One of the Marines exposits. There is a Bad Sniper named Mustafa as opposed to the Good Sniper named American. Sorry, THE LEGEND. Sorry, Chris Kyle, but you can call him THE LEGEND.
Ginger: Because that’s what half the country is named. The other guy is Muhammad.
Random Grunt #64 goes on about how Bad Guy Mustafa is awesome at sniping and was in the Olympics for sniping.
I’m going to digress for a second and point out that Bad Guy Mustafa is among the stupidest conceits in the movie. He was not a real guy as far as anyone knows, and he was just added for drama. The problem is, he’s a blatant rip-off of the bad guy in Enemy At the Gates, which is a vastly superior movie, though not without its flaws.
The main problem with a movie about snipers is that most of a sniper’s job is pretty boring. You’re lying in wait, then picking people off at a distance. I’m not going to go all Michael Moore and say that it’s cowardly (they did not make a movie about the dudes who dropped white phosphorus on Fallujah at least) but it doesn’t make for very compelling action sequences, not does it work terribly well for setting up an antagonist.
Enemy at the Gates fixed the dramatic problem in two ways. One, the conflict was mainly internal, between the sniper and the political officer, the latter standing in for the rigid structure of the Soviet government. So you had two characters in conflict (though ostensibly on the same side) physically in the same place and able to interact. There was an evil Nazi sniper as well, but that conflict was secondary. Also, the entire story all took place during the Siege of Stalingrad, so it made sense that the two snipers kept running into each other.
This movie takes place over four separate tours of duty, possibly in different cities (I’m unclear as to whether it’s always Fallujah) and thus Bad Guy Mustafa makes no sense. It’s not like the two snipers can exchange dialogue.
But back to the woman and kid and THE LEGEND on the roof, heroically sniping for freedom.
Yeah so he shoots the kid. The other guy says, “Gnarly,” but THE LEGEND is very serious.
Then the woman picks up the grenade and he shoots her too. Congrats! It is a grenade and it explodes. Because our hero can’t be wrong and is godlike and infallible.
I mean, this could be an opening for nuance. Our Hero’s very first kills are a cute child and a woman, when it’s been established that THE LEGEND wants to start a family with his new wife. Maybe we could draw some parallels, like people are drawn to violence because they are compelled to protect their homes and loved ones. From the Iraqi perspective, after all, this lady and her kid are sheepdogs and the Americans are the wolves.
If you really insisted on it, you could make this a movie about how good people do bad things for a good cause. It would be awful, but better than this.
Or! He could be wrong, and they could have been holding something not a grenade, and this scene could have illustrated the senselessness of war. You know, like the puppy scene in Apocalypse Now.
But nuance is not a thing that happens in this movie, and this scene only shows THE LEGEND’s awesome ability to determine threats from a distance. The bad guys are always correctly identified as bad guys, and THE LEGEND does not ever fuck up because ‘MURRCA.
Wisecracking sidekick is jubilant, but despite his heroic victory over the small child and the lady, THE LEGEND remains grimdark.
Merrick: Aww, look. He has a conscience.
Ginger: No he’s just checking to make sure that he didn’t fuck up his shot.
Stay tuned for more desaturated visuals so that you know that this is an adult movie about serious things!
Quote of the day:
* Good news! The special edition Irish whisky Innis and Gunn is out! It’s 7.2% and still failed to make me like this movie.
I announce the triumphant return of the CHEATSHEET OF FREEDOM. And it’s the EXTRA FREEDOM EDITION.
(For those of you who aren’t familiar with this—er—feature of my little blog, it’s where I watch bad movies—and occasionally good ones—so you don’t have to.)
Our featured movie is American Sniper, starring Bradley Cooper and directed by Clint Eastwood. Now, when this movie was released, I had zero interest in seeing it because everything, from the casting to the posters to the title itself, sounded dead boring. (Spoiler: I was right.) However, since noted film critic Sarah Palin and her army of cinematic connoisseurs started shitting up the internet with the assertion that if you didn’t like this movie, the terrorists win, my curiosity was piqued and I had to know what the fuss was about. So I downloaded an illegal torrent (obviously, I am not going to pay money to see this) and invited a few folks over to suffer with me.
Seth Rogen infamously compared this movie to Stolz der Nation, the fake propaganda film featured in Tarantino’s masterpiece Inglourious Basterds. (Then had to double back on his statement and praise the film, because freedom of speech.) This is an unfair comparison. Stolz der Nation, from what we see of it, looks like the kind of film someone might actually want to watch. American Sniper is not.
Folks, there is absolutely nothing good about this movie. Nothing. It has no redeeming value. I have had students in my class shit out better movies than this. I’m not saying that it’s a bad movie because it’s politically abhorrent, though it is. It is politically bad. But this is tangential to the point. It’s a bad movie on every possible level and Eastwood should know better.
But before I get into why, let’s have a brief digression into common tropes and audience expectations in war movies. To get this out of the way, war movies are not my favourite thing. I have issues around telling similar-looking people apart, so if all of your characters are crew-cut, young white men in uniforms, I’m immediately going to hit an obstacle. (In this movie, for example, I was unclear as to the names of any of the characters and had to look them up on IMDb, and asked my friends several times which crew-cut white guy was which.) This said, there are a lot of good war movies, most of which I’ve watched, so I do know what I’m talking about here.
Nor does every war movie need to be Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket. (But if a movie is nominated for an Oscar, I’m going to hold it to somewhere around that standard.) Still, this doesn’t even hold up to the standard of regular, run-of-the-mill war movies, and here’s why:
There is a certain pattern we expect from an average, Hollywood, disposable war movie. Hero gets recruited or drafted into a war. There’s a training montage, wherein he is shit and treated like shit by his CO. Hero bonds with his unit. Hero has some sort of skill (like having hunted as a kid so he’s a good shot) that makes him valuable. Hero goes off to war, and it’s not what he expected. Hero’s sidekick looks at a picture of his wife or girlfriend back in Iowa and remarks that he gets to see her in three weeks. Hero’s sidekick dies. Hero either survives or everyone dies and it’s a commentary on the pointlessness of war. This movie, technically speaking, has some of these notes, but manages to strike them in precisely the wrong way.
The scene with the picture of the wife/girlfriend is cliché and heavy-handed, but it exists for a reason. We know what’s going to happen to that guy. It’s there for audience identification, to remind us of the humanity of the guys in uniform. Same with the training montage and the hero being told he’s shit; we require these low points in order to build sympathy and dramatic interest. Even though the hero is running around killing people in an exotic locale, he dreams of a simple life and in his heart he is a regular dude just like us.
American Sniper takes a very different approach. Eastwood does not want you to identify with the protagonist or any of the secondary characters. In the ideology of this film, soldiers are not, in fact, just like us. They are literally a different breed of humanity, and you cannot understand them because you are not currently at war. You are a sheep, not a sheepdog. At least 75% of the movie is other characters telling Chris Kyle that he is awesome and not to blame for anything bad that happens. 1% of the movie is people underestimating him or telling him that he’s shit. He does not fuck up (except a bit at the end, but we’ll get to this). He needs no character arc, because he is not a character. It’s kind of an interesting take in that it flies in the face of every convention of Western cinema to the point that the movie is almost unrecognizable as a movie, but unfortunately it does not work as an entertaining movie-going experience.
But on with the review. I couldn’t watch this alone, so I invited some friends over. They insisted on pseudonyms because they know I have a pseudonym, so meet Fistula Dulles, Merrick A. Hater, and Ginger Baker. Not their real names. We ordered a massive quantity of Hakka food and I’d stocked the fridge with Innis and Gunn*. Merrick doesn’t drink so he had to watch the whole thing sober. Anyway, with the constitution of true heroes and suitable libations at hand, we sat down and watched American Sniper so that you don’t have to.
Spoilers for the entire movie. Not like you should watch this movie.
Our movie begins with an ominous call to prayer—reminding you that Muslims are scary and inscrutable—and the sound of tanks driving over shit.
Our hero, Chris Kyle, a.k.a., THE LEGEND, is sniping on a roof with a wisecracking sidekick. To establish the seriousness of the stakes, the wisecracking sidekick declares that even the dirt tastes like dogshit. THE LEGEND asks how he would know. This is what passes for humour in this movie, and unfortunately, there’s a lot of it.
Fistula: GRITTY REALISM!!
Ginger: I don’t get why people don’t like these guys.
Ginger: That guy deserves to die just for the outfit.
THE LEGEND debates whether he should kill the pretty lady and the cute little kid. Wisecracking sidekick opines that “they” will “fry [his] ass” if he makes the wrong call.
Sabs: NO THEY WOULD NOT FRY YOUR ASS IF YOU WERE WRONG. THEY LITERALLY NEVER DO THAT.
Merrick: Terrorists are such bad parents.
Sabs: That’s the difference between them and us.
Just as THE LEGEND is about to shoot the kid (who has a very obvious grenade), we cut to the all-important backstory:
Baby THE LEGEND killing a deer with his father, which is exactly like killing a woman and child in a country your country has invaded under false pretences.
Baby THE LEGEND is the kind of kid who loves his father and calls him “sir.”
Baby THE LEGEND pays close attention in church, which is significant because the sermon is about how mere humans cannot possibly see with God’s eyes or know his mysterious plan. See, American snipers are just like God in that way. It’s that subtle.
Baby THE LEGEND pulls a Bible out of the pew and stuffs it in his pocket right in front of his family.
Ginger: Did he just boost the fuckin’ Bible? That’s like the first page. Thou shalt not steal.
Papa THE LEGEND voiceovers a lecture to his sons about how there are three strains of humanity: sheep (who are pussies), wolves (who eat pussy, but not in a good way) and sheepdogs (who aren’t pussies) while a really fat kid on the playground beats up baby THE LEGEND’S little brother and baby THE LEGEND beats up the fat kid. Papa THE LEGEND threatens to whup his kids’ asses if they turn into wolves. The boys are all, “SIR YES SIR.”
For the rest of the movie, you have permission to picture this:
every time THE LEGEND appears on screen.
Ginger: Very good, my sons are not pussies.
Ma THE LEGEND gets one line, by the way. There are only two other women in this entire movie who get more than one speaking line or so, and one of those is reading a letter written by a man. Ma THE LEGEND just sits there and lets her gigantic glasses do the talking, the way a woman should.
This is the most manly movie that ever manlied. It is so manly that, as I type this review, I can feel hair growing on balls that weren’t even there before.
Grown-up THE LEGEND is now a rodeo cowboy. Apparently rodeos happen in the middle of the night. Are rodeos a night thing? I don’t know anything about rodeos.
There is dialogue between THE LEGEND and his little brother, but all of the characters in this movie are less comprehensible than the guys in True Detective. The difference was that in True Detective, I was interested enough to strain to make out what Matthew McConaughey was saying even though he sounded like he was speaking through a mouthful of marbles (no offence to Texans but y’all are really difficult to understand).
I’m pretty sure the dialogue is as follows:
“AW SHUCKS SIR”
“SIR MA’AM SIR SHUCKS”
“AMERICUH!”
But I’m going to pretend they’re saying:
“I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself - we are creatures that should not exist by natural law... We are things that labour under the illusion of having a self, that accretion of sensory experience and feelings, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody... I think the honourable thing for our species to do is to deny our programming. Stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction—one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.”
Man, that’s a great monologue. Why am I not watching that?
THE LEGEND walks in on his girlfriend cheating on him. She’s all, “I do this to get attention.”
Also, apparently THE LEGEND is not so legendary in bed. He kicks the girlfriend out and then he and his brother have a good laugh.
As THE LEGEND and his little brother discuss whether or not it is awesome to be a midnight cowboy, the TV drops a load of convenient exposition:
The US embassy in Tanzania has just been bombed by unknown extremists. AMERICA IS AT WAR and Our Hero suddenly has a sense of purpose beyond weird midnight rodeos.
THE LEGEND is so touched by this horrific scene that he almost shows an emotion. He breathes heavily and fumes, “Look what they did to us.”
THE LEGEND wastes no time in enlisting.
Sailor boy determines that THE LEGEND is sufficiently patriotic and likes to fight, so decides that he should be a SEAL and explains what it stands for.
Ginger: Is this real? Do they have pamphlets on how to be a SEAL?
Drill sergeants spray the recruits with water and shout barely comprehensible abuse at them. It’s manly. It’s wet. It’s borderline homoerotic.
Ginger: Beats the fuck out of McDonalds. Barely.
Merrick: Love at first sight!
Sabs: I’d really like the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket right now.
Fistula: Or Lou Gossett Jr.
Forget what I said about borderline. I think they're actually doing a human centipede in this scene.
All other team-building training montages have been deemed insufficiently manly. These guys are so manly that they use each other for dart boards and don’t even flinch.
This would be the Meet Cute portion of the movie, wherein THE LEGEND meets a girl that IMDb tells me is named Taya. She hangs around in Navy SEAL bars even though she does not seem to care for the military and just wants to be left alone. He charms her by being slightly less skeevy than another, married, Navy SEAL, and opines that it is her leather pants that are making all the men hit on her. So manly! So sensitive!
He challenges her to a game of Truth or Drink. I wish I were drinking more than I am right now.
Ginger: This is classic predatory behaviour.
Taya calls THE LEGEND arrogant, self-centred, lying cheaters. He says he’ll lay down his life for his country and calls her ma’am a lot.
Fistula: Who’s scruffy looking?
Being a lady with a tiny lady mind, she has no idea of the MEANING OF SACRIFICE so he just buys her more drinks and is patriotic.
Ginger: That’s all a man has to do. Ply her with drinks and tell her she’s pretty. Courtship done! Now she’s pukin’.
Sabs: I’m pukin’.
Back to the part of the film that people care about. The recruits target shoot. Mindfully. The drill sergeant monologues about holding your breath.
Merrick: Zen and the Art of Sniping.
There's a clumsy parallel between THE LEGEND learning to be a sniper and THE LEGEND courting Taya, who is the kind of lady who sits thoughtfully on a tasteful couch, wearing makeup, and reading magazines (she’s not one of those intellectual types who reads books). He calls and leaves her a bunch of messages and is basically stalkery. These scenes are juxtaposed with firing range scenes because the gun is his penis.
Sabs: Is this the Meet Cute bit?
She goes for it.
Taya: Ever think about what happens when there’s a real person on the other end of the gun?
THE LEGEND: Aww shucks. Shucks. Aww. Shucks.
The gravitas of this conversation is hampered somewhat by the presence of a giant stuffed bear on THE LEGEND’S shoulders.
They do the sex.
PENIS! I mean snake. Anyway, training montage complete. And courtship montage complete. It’s a two-fer and now it's out of the way.
A second plane flies into what is at this point still a very thin plot.
Sienna Miller’s terrible acting in this scene cannot be overstated. She’s bad throughout the movie, but it’s particularly apparent here. She’s like, “CHRIS! OH NO!” in this utterly flat tone that made us all laugh.
While we’re on the topic of tragic loss, what happened to Bradley Cooper’s neck?
Anyway, he stares broodingly at the TV, then broodingly into his gun. I guess that scene is supposed to humanize him but he only has one facial expression, which is staring off into the distance, so it doesn’t quite work.
Taya becomes MRS. THE LEGEND. They dance to predictably bland music. He has a weird green patch on his neck that is never explained. Well, maybe it is, but I honestly can’t understand the mumbly delivery.
The Marines are STOKED to be going to war.
Ginger: Let’s go kill some Ay-RABS.
Merrick: Or whoever.
Everyone: FUCK YEAH!
TOUR 1.
OKAY GOOD we’re back in Fallujah, half an hour into the movie. This bland white people romance was really getting to me.
On to the exposition part of the story. There’s a bunch of military strategy that is nearly as dull as the EPIC COURTSHIP OF THE LEGEND AND MRS THE LEGEND. Basically, Fallujah has been evacuated of civilians (no mention of white phosphorus, of course) and so any military-age male that the soldiers encounter is part of Al Qaeda in Iraq there to kill good honest ‘MURRCANS. Not for any other reason like the fact that they live there. It’s convenient though because they have license to just shoot anyone they encounter.
Oh yes, and THE LEGEND has grown a BEARD OF SERIOUS BUSINESS. GRITTY!
Most shots in the movie look something like this. Note the manly poses and cheap post-production. The biggest disappointment with this movie is that I thought that the cinematography would at least be good. I mean, you have a war zone and Clint Eastwood directing; this should not be hard. But the movie looks like shit in addition to being shit.
One of the Marines exposits. There is a Bad Sniper named Mustafa as opposed to the Good Sniper named American. Sorry, THE LEGEND. Sorry, Chris Kyle, but you can call him THE LEGEND.
Ginger: Because that’s what half the country is named. The other guy is Muhammad.
Random Grunt #64 goes on about how Bad Guy Mustafa is awesome at sniping and was in the Olympics for sniping.
I’m going to digress for a second and point out that Bad Guy Mustafa is among the stupidest conceits in the movie. He was not a real guy as far as anyone knows, and he was just added for drama. The problem is, he’s a blatant rip-off of the bad guy in Enemy At the Gates, which is a vastly superior movie, though not without its flaws.
The main problem with a movie about snipers is that most of a sniper’s job is pretty boring. You’re lying in wait, then picking people off at a distance. I’m not going to go all Michael Moore and say that it’s cowardly (they did not make a movie about the dudes who dropped white phosphorus on Fallujah at least) but it doesn’t make for very compelling action sequences, not does it work terribly well for setting up an antagonist.
Enemy at the Gates fixed the dramatic problem in two ways. One, the conflict was mainly internal, between the sniper and the political officer, the latter standing in for the rigid structure of the Soviet government. So you had two characters in conflict (though ostensibly on the same side) physically in the same place and able to interact. There was an evil Nazi sniper as well, but that conflict was secondary. Also, the entire story all took place during the Siege of Stalingrad, so it made sense that the two snipers kept running into each other.
This movie takes place over four separate tours of duty, possibly in different cities (I’m unclear as to whether it’s always Fallujah) and thus Bad Guy Mustafa makes no sense. It’s not like the two snipers can exchange dialogue.
But back to the woman and kid and THE LEGEND on the roof, heroically sniping for freedom.
Yeah so he shoots the kid. The other guy says, “Gnarly,” but THE LEGEND is very serious.
Then the woman picks up the grenade and he shoots her too. Congrats! It is a grenade and it explodes. Because our hero can’t be wrong and is godlike and infallible.
I mean, this could be an opening for nuance. Our Hero’s very first kills are a cute child and a woman, when it’s been established that THE LEGEND wants to start a family with his new wife. Maybe we could draw some parallels, like people are drawn to violence because they are compelled to protect their homes and loved ones. From the Iraqi perspective, after all, this lady and her kid are sheepdogs and the Americans are the wolves.
If you really insisted on it, you could make this a movie about how good people do bad things for a good cause. It would be awful, but better than this.
Or! He could be wrong, and they could have been holding something not a grenade, and this scene could have illustrated the senselessness of war. You know, like the puppy scene in Apocalypse Now.
But nuance is not a thing that happens in this movie, and this scene only shows THE LEGEND’s awesome ability to determine threats from a distance. The bad guys are always correctly identified as bad guys, and THE LEGEND does not ever fuck up because ‘MURRCA.
Wisecracking sidekick is jubilant, but despite his heroic victory over the small child and the lady, THE LEGEND remains grimdark.
Merrick: Aww, look. He has a conscience.
Ginger: No he’s just checking to make sure that he didn’t fuck up his shot.
Stay tuned for more desaturated visuals so that you know that this is an adult movie about serious things!
Quote of the day:
* Good news! The special edition Irish whisky Innis and Gunn is out! It’s 7.2% and still failed to make me like this movie.
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no subject
Date: 2015-02-09 03:04 am (UTC)Also if I were his CO I'd have him up on fucking charges for taking a personal call while he was in the field and actively engaged in a fire-fight. Dude, seriously??
no subject
Date: 2015-02-09 12:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-02-09 05:11 pm (UTC)Not to mention that, from a military standpoint, cell phones are super not secure, and they can be used to track your position via the built-in GPS even if you don't have any access to cell tower pings. Hell, we've got that app on our android phones.
So you get/make a call, they could pick up on it, and now you've just given the enemy a way to track your position! That's ridiculously useful intel, even without a long-range sniper on the team. When it lets you pinpoint where the bloody sniper is then congrats, by bringing your personal phone into the field and taking calls on it, you've just doomed your entire unit.
But I guess it makes for far more gripping cinema if the moronic wife keeps trying to have conversations with him about their marriage instead of letting him devote his full attention to the guys shooting at them
--Mike wandered by just now though and pointed out that they do have secure phones, and that it probably wasn't a personal phone. He says probably she would have called the base and they would have forwarded the call to him so she wouldn't even have needed access to the phone number for it. And of course if it's the same phone that work uses to contact you you're going to answer it.
I don't remember the scene as well as he does but when I said "But then as soon as he realized it wasn't work calling him he should have just said "Can't talk now I'll call you later" and hung up, which Mike says he did try to do but then he dropped the phone. Says while he promised he'd call later and would be fine, they both knew that wasn't a promise he could make, and that when he dropped it, for all she knew it was because he'd just been hit and she was listening to her husband's last moments alive. He found the scene very poignant because of it, so maybe the movie means more to people who have been in the military, I don't know.
no subject
Date: 2015-02-09 09:35 pm (UTC)I watched it with someone who is ex-military and he was tearing his hair out at that, though not as much as a scene that I'll talk about in the next bit. So YMMV.