American Sniper (2014)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
U.S. Navy SEAL Chris Kyle takes his sole mission—protect his comrades—to heart and becomes one of the most lethal snipers in American history. His pinpoint accuracy not only saves countless lives but also makes him a prime target of insurgents. Despite grave danger and his struggle to be a good husband and father to his family back in the States, Kyle serves four tours of duty in Iraq. However, when he finally returns home, he finds that he cannot leave the war behind.
65 connections found
View:
65 films that influenced American Sniper
What critics say influenced American Sniper
Similarly great films like “The Hurt Locker” and “Blackhawk Down” were more graphic (and just as profane) but not any more gripping.
For a man who saw a war through the scope of a rifle, the newfound mundaneness of his life is interesting, but it was portrayed far more effectively in the waning, wordless moments of Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker.”
Of course, there have been great war films that didn’t deal directly with the politics of war itself—Kathryn Bigelow’s still-jarring The Hurt Locker (2009), for one—but those films succeeded because their depiction of war was so powerful and the central characters were so compelling.
As we learned from the best of the Vietnam war films, and as superb films about the Middle East war such as The Hurt Locker, Lone Survivor and Zero Dark Thirty have reinforced, America's modern enemies - and, therefore, our enemies - don't recognise the uniforms, rules, protocols, theatres or even age limits of conventional warfare.
The scenes, rich and rife with conflict and drenched with sun and sand, feel borrowed from Katherine Bigelow’s haunting wartime chronicle “The Hurt Locker,” yet there’s no plumbing of the soul or genuine crisis of conscience in Eastwood’s endeavor.
“American Sniper” is an Iraq War movie, a genre so small it pretty much begins and ends with “The Hurt Locker.”
It’s either a new generation’s Sergeant York or the misguided American equivalent of that Nazi propaganda film-within-a-film in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (2008).
Biopics about American war heroes are a Hollywood tradition going all the way back to Gary Cooper starring as the legendary World War I sharpshooter "Sergeant York" and World War II's highly decorated Audie Murphy playing himself in "To Hell and Back." "American Sniper" is squarely in that mold, but because it's directed by Clint Eastwood something else is going on as well.
Like The Hurt Locker and a century’s worth of war movies that preceded it—from Sergeant York to Saving Private Ryan—it provides an opportunity to examine the artistic representation of combat.
Eastwood’s Chris is a movie war hero with echoes of Gary Cooper’s Sergeant York , the good-ole-boy pacifist who won the Medal of Honor for killing 28 Germans and capturing another 132 in a World War I raid, and Jeremy Renner’s Sgt.
Bulked up yet still able to express his signature neuroticism (dialed down from the David O. Russell comedies), Cooper has never been better, registering a seesawing psychology on par with Gary Cooper’s turn in Sergeant York.
American Sniper possesses the sweep and scope of Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter, but very little of that movie's romantic grandeur.
Not since The Deer Hunter, however, has Hollywood done such justice as American Sniper to polemical wars?
Like Michael Cimino’s similarly themed Vietnam war epic The Deer Hunter, Stone’s film eschewed the sentimental, jingoistic tone of World War II combat films, revising their tropes of greatest-generation heroism and camaraderie to reflect a more caustic viewpoint about a more divisive war.
It’s a moment similar to when The Deer Hunter (1978) arrived.
Veterans Day: 14 Real-Life Soldiers Portrayed in Film (Photos) Tom Cruise as Ron Kovacs in "Born on the Fourth of July" George C. Scott as George S. Patton in "Patton" Christian Bale as Dieter Dengler in "Rescue Dawn" Mark Wahlberg as Marcus Luttrell in "Lone Survivor" Real-life veteran R. Lee Ermey as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in "Full Metal Jacket" Real-life veteran Dale Dye as Captain Harris in "Platoon" Real-life war hero Audie Murphy as Audie Murphy in "To Hell and Back" Jeremy Renner as Sgt.
American Sniper doesn't glorify what Kyle did, but like the angrier Born on the Fourth of July makes clear why he did it.
Unfortunately, the movie stalls during its final twenty minutes as it attempts to switch gears and present a theme that other films (like Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July and the aforementioned Brothers) have done better.
Advertisement
Veterans Day: 14 Real-Life Soldiers Portrayed in Film (Photos) Tom Cruise as Ron Kovacs in "Born on the Fourth of July" George C. Scott as George S. Patton in "Patton" Christian Bale as Dieter Dengler in "Rescue Dawn" Mark Wahlberg as Marcus Luttrell in "Lone Survivor" Real-life veteran R. Lee Ermey as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in "Full Metal Jacket" Real-life veteran Dale Dye as Captain Harris in "Platoon" Real-life war hero Audie Murphy as Audie Murphy in "To Hell and Back" Jeremy Renner as Sgt.
Biopics about American war heroes are a Hollywood tradition going all the way back to Gary Cooper starring as the legendary World War I sharpshooter "Sergeant York" and World War II's highly decorated Audie Murphy playing himself in "To Hell and Back." "American Sniper" is squarely in that mold, but because it's directed by Clint Eastwood something else is going on as well.
What makes it extra special is that Eastwood lifted it from the spaghetti western The Return of Ringo (1965).
Eastwood alternates between harrowing war imagery — a mesmerizing battle in a sandstorm recalls the vertiginous chaos of “Black Hawk Down” — and quieter moments of equal power.
Recent war films such as “Black Hawk Down” (2001), and “United 93” (2006) wear their obvious political ideologies on their sleeves.
Recall the boundless irony in Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers (the sad story of Native American war hero Ira Hayes) and Letters from Iwo Jima (the director's view of Japanese soldiers fighting and dying in vain) — and other combat adventures, such as Lone Survivor (SEALs in Afghanistan), Fury (Brad Pitt against the Nazis), and Black Hawk Down (Army Rangers vs. insurgents in Somalia) — and we realize something is lacking.
American Sniper may not be the strongest biopic in the genre, but it is on par with other acclaimed military action-thrillers like Black Hawk Down or The Hurt Locker.
Even then the sniper sequences aren’t as compelling as in Enemy at the Gates , lacks the intensity of Jeremy Renner’s disaffected soldier in The Hurt Locker and doesn’t offer that time is against them feeling of Black Hawk Down .
Knee-jerk leftist Michael Moore chimed in on Twitter calling snipers “cowards” and Seth Rogen made a regrettable gag that American Sniper reminded him of the Nazi propaganda film premiered in the last act of Inglourious Basterds.
The rhetoric has been charged: Seth Rogen tweeted that the movie reminded him of “Nation’s Pride”—the movie-within-a-movie about a heroic Nazi sniper in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.
In the past few days Eastwood’s film has become a fight-starting tinderbox on Twitter and in the media, with Michael Moore expressing dismay at the film’s romanticization of sniper warfare, and Seth Rogen comparing Sniper to the fictional Nazi propaganda film featured in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.
Advertisement
If you want to see recent movies that fit more accurately into the war genre designation you could check out Kimberly Peirce’s “Stop-Loss” (2008) or Paul Haggis’s “In the Valley of Elah” (2007).
Kimberly Peirce’s Stop-Loss , Paul Haggis’ In the Valley of Elah and Paul Greengrass’ Green Zone asked searching questions about the human costs of America’s post-9/11 interventions—questions that echoed through near-empty theaters.
It doesn’t say violence is beautiful, but that it is necessary, placing it closer to “Unforgiven” than to Eastwood’s dreadfully reductionist war pictures “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters from Iwo Jima.”
Inspired by Chris Kyle?s own memoir and directed by Oscar winner Clint Eastwood (Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby ), American Sniper showcases the life of the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history.
Like William Munny (Unforgiven) or Walt Kowalski (Gran Torino), he’s an uncommonly good shot and a reluctant hero, half-believing the stories about him but also too aware of what’s wrong with them.
“I need you to be human again,” Taya cries at one point, a crucial line of dialogue that undercuts any simplistic sense of jingoism that might be ladled onto the film (at another point, Kyle tells his son while out hunting “It’s a heck of a thing stopping a beating heart,” which has to be a purposeful echo of the infamous line in Eastwood’s masterpiece Unforgiven “It’s a hell of a thing killin’ a man”).
“American Sniper,” Eastwood’s 37th film as a director, is his darkest, tightest and most morally ambiguous drama since he shot the western dead with “Unforgiven.”
After years of “one for you” (a “Dirty Harry” flick) and “one for me” (“Honky Tonk Man,” “White Hunter, Black Heart”) with Warner Brothers, Eastwood created “Unforgiven,” winning his first directing Oscar along the way.