American Sniper: War, What is it Good for?

There were several movies nominated for Oscars this year that I had to push myself to see. When I did, I discovered they were absolutely moving and wonderful (see: Whiplash, Two Days, One Night, Wild, etc.) Unfortunately, American Sniper, a movie I did not want to see, fully lived up to my expectations.

To be fair, there is nothing wrong with the performances in this movie. Bradley Cooper does a really great job portraying real-life Marine sniper, Chris Kyle, a man who went through four tours of duty during the Iraq war and made more kills than any other sniper in history. Cooper captures Kyle's initial hesitations, fears, gradual hubris, PTSD, and the other assorted psychological and physical transformations that are part and parcel of a soldier's life. Sienna Miller, who plays Kyle's wife, Taya, does an equally impressive job portraying the fear and uncertainty of an army wife, who can never know if her husband will return safe to her at home, and must then face even more worry when he returns home but still seems miles away.

The trouble with the movie is its gratuitous, rah-rah depiction of the nature of war. We don't need war movies where the Americans save the day and the Iraqis are "savages" who are shot down like characters in a video game. The movie is adapted from Kyle's memoir, and from what I hear, the movie at least attempts to be a little more ambiguous than Kyle's straightforward account of how he just liked killing bad guys. I can't pretend to be an unbiased viewer: this is emphatically not a movie made for me, and I don't understand how it is breaking records at the box office.

American Sniper is a very basic war movie. Man goes to war, shoots a bunch of people, comes home, suffers, and then starts to rebuild his life. It feels very bloated and violent, peppered by overlong war sequences and dramatic battles than only grow wearisome and don't develop the plot or characters in any significant way. If director Client Eastwood's object was to make me battle-weary, then he succeeded admirably, but I think this was supposed to make me cheer and root for an American hero. Instead, I just felt a bit sad and tired and decided I'd rather watch a small movie that told a moving story instead of a re-hashed war-mongering film that has nothing new to say.