American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, 2014)

[DarkImbecile]

It seems no one can say anything bad about this film or the main character without getting labeled as unpatriotic and be reminded that we owe "our freedom" to all these brave men.

Well, get your label-makers fired up, because I'd like to be the first in this thread to say unequivocally that American Sniper is an awful movie.

Totally apart from its problematic politics/general ignorance of its subject matter, Sniper is fundamentally a poorly made, dramatically weak film that fails whether one views it as a fictionalized narrative or as a journalistic biopic.

The lazy production values were a constant distraction - I found the heavy use of cheap, obvious CGI during the battle sequences even more distracting and off-putting than the much-maligned fake baby. The vast majority of the bullet strikes/squibs, blood, and explosions were as obviously digitally fake as the effects in a straight-to-video Expendables ripoff, while an overhead shot from the perspective of a drone looked like a video game outtake. I can usually tolerate Eastwood's rushed, "close enough is good enough" production style, but in a film in which much of the dramatic tension has to come from a visceral identification with the seemingly real danger the protagonist encounters, cutting corners this blatantly and regularly completely took me out of the events onscreen.

The narrative itself has almost no tension, because it's made clear early on that Chris Kyle is a superhero, a rare and noble sheepdog here to protect the many weak sheep from the evil wolves, in the terms of the utterly patronizing metaphor that opens the movie, and which could be read as a subtle parody of the "dicks, pussies, and assholes" speech from Team America if there was any hint that this movie took itself with anything less than the utmost seriousness. He has no discernible flaws, other than that he cares too much about the fellow soldiers he couldn't save and has to find a way past the mildest case of PTSD ever put on screen, which we're told he's even more of a hero for being able to do (primarily by using his status as "Legend" to be a mentor to other wounded vets). There are a few well-done moments that hint at some potential for alternative perspectives on Kyle's life, like

Spoiler

his meeting with his brother on an Iraqi airfield and his discomfort at the adulation shown by a marine back in the civilian world,

but these are quickly glossed over in favor of more hagiography. Even if Chris Kyle actually was this amazing a soldier, father, husband, and friend in life, it is completely uninteresting to watch Texan perfection (sprinkled with just the slightest bit of excusable flaws) do battle against cartoonish caricatures of Arab evil for 2-1/2 hours. Compounding the lack of dramatic tension, even Kyle's barely sketched fellow SEALs who are killed have their fates clearly telegraphed by

Spoiler

discussing a wedding ring immediately beforehand and showing signs of questioning the war.

Basically all credit for what the film does genuinely well belongs to Bradley Cooper, who does an excellent job propping up a movie that might have been completely unwatchable with a lesser actor in the role. Sienna Miller also does good work, but is marginalized as an army wife stereotype or a conservative pixie dream girl (horny yet faithful, feisty yet obedient, constantly pregnant, seemingly no career or interests outside of her man and kids) for maybe 80% of her screen time.

So, because Sniper fails as a dramatic narrative, and with almost all of what weak and inconsistent thematic content it has done better by other films, most notably The Hurt Locker, the film's one saving grace would be if it depicted a series of really amazing, too-good-to-be-true events that at least partially make up for other weaknesses with some sheer "wow, I can't believe it actually happened like that" power (Unbreakable attempts to rely on this crutch to overcome some weaknesses as well, more successfully). This is where the "journalistic veracity" complaint mentioned above actually becomes valid; if a filmmaker distorts or massages history to tell a better story in service of a compelling movie, that's a forgivable, even laudable decision that at the very least needs to be separated from the quality of the film as a film. If, however, the story being told is only interesting or compelling if its events really happened the way the film depicts them, then questions about the accuracy of those events are totally fair game.

To that end, let me just say that much of American Sniper is a bunch of bullshit. Even if Eastwood was merely portraying Kyle's understanding of events in Iraq by completely walling them off from any context or larger understanding (the larger irresponsibility of which is addressed below), basic factual inconsistencies and improbabilities abound. To pick just one example,

Spoiler

the idea that the enemy sniper, Mustafa, with whom Kyle spars over the course of the film a)can be easily identified by Kyle by his skill (which apparently only one guy among the hundreds of thousands of militants fighting in Iraq could possibly possess), b)would be able to somehow operate both in the Sunni-controlled Anbar province and in the Shia-controlled Sadr City over the course of several years while those groups were in even more open warfare with each other than with the Americans, and c)was definitely, without a doubt the guy Kyle killed from a mile away without confirmation is absurd.

Finally, I really do try not to be a knee-jerk reactionary progressive (if that phrase even makes sense) when it comes to movies - as I think my consistent defense of Zero Dark Thirty on this board would demonstrate - so I came into the film with as open a mind as I could muster, hoping for at the very least a pro-military war drama on the level of Lone Survivor (far superior even while carrying some similar veracity issues). Like others here, I was excited by the unique quality of the trailers and had heard enough of the initial backlash and backlash-to-the-backlash to be open to either side of the argument. Unfortunately, I was really struck by how accurate Seth Rogen's much-derided comment was: without making any direct comparisons between the armies and leaders their respective protagonists fought for, American Sniper really is basically a modern, full-length version of Nation's Pride from Inglourious Basterds: a celebration of military heroism completely divorced from any context and seemingly designed to allow viewers to ignore anything difficult, controversial, or problematic about the setting and marvel at the Platonic ideal of a patriot forced to kill the enemy in great numbers to protect his country's interests. I don't know that I've ever been on this end of this complaint about a movie before, but it felt irresponsible for Eastwood to, among other things, depict the "enemies" Kyle kills solely as al-Qaeda-affiliated militants,

Spoiler

(the one partial exception being the mother and child that are his first kills, and even there she's just dismissed as an "evil bitch" with no second thought as to why she might have felt compelled to do what she did),

connect the Iraq war to 9/11, and constantly deflect any suggestion that killing people in Iraq wasn't directly connected to protecting American citizens in America. The disturbing element that one of the film's main villains (and its most deliriously cartoonish caricature) used a drill as a preferred method of execution is even more problematic when one remembers that the same method was a favored way for our nominal allies in the Iraqi state security forces to commit ethnic cleansing on a mass scale across the country. I could go on, but to summarize, the problem here is less that the vision of the world presented by the film is ideologically conservative but that by unquestioningly presenting what is by all accounts an accurate depiction of Kyle's perspective on his actions and the war he fought, the film does a massive disservice to any audience member unable to bring enough context to the film to recognize it as wholly subjective and not an attempt to accurately portray a person and an important era in recent history whose consequences are still being felt.

The film I kept thinking about while driving home from Sniper was Oliver Stone's JFK, which I would defend to the death as well-made, compelling film and that also happens to have at best a distant relationship with reality; unfortunately, Sniper doesn't even have the excuse of being a good movie to allow one to look past the untruths and lies by omission. Ultimately, however, the biggest failing of American Sniper isn't that it's too politically problematic, but that it's too cheap, ignorant, and uninterested in anything about its subject that might actually be compelling.

[matrixschmatrix]

Wow, not to cheerlead, but that's a really solid, well crafted review- thanks for that.

[Michael Kerpan]

Congrats, DI!

[dx23]

Really good review there! I think that everything you said is true, but because of the film's politics and the current affairs in the US, the topics that you touch are hard to discuss publicly without getting into a shouting match. I know it's hard to separate the film from the politics but the rationale in the US that anything said against this film is almost an act of treason, makes me wonder more and more of the potential this film had.

[hearthesilence]

I didn't think the film was terrible, but I have to admit, when that second spoiler came up in the film, I was hoping it wouldn't be so predictable. The very first thing that came to mind was a Simpsons joke….

Spoiler

….when Homer watches what appears to be the very first McBain movie in a video store. The scene he catches sets up the revenge motive that's always referred to in every clip that's seen in the show. His partner, close to retirement, with a daughter graduating from college, and a new boat that's called the "Live Forever." That's right, NEVER lay out your life plans in an action movie.

[dx23]

Bill Maher Calls Real-Life American Sniper ‘Psychopathic Patriot’

[flyonthewall2983]

I know I bash him a bit here, but I'm glad Maher didn't toe the company line on this (HBO is owned by Time Warner which of course owns Warner Brothers).

The Hollywood Reporter on how the national debate will affect the film's Oscar chances. God, someone should post multiple copies of that Jane Fonda tweet all over Hannity's desk.

[D50]

Most people miss what American Sniper is really about. It's not a fluff piece for a particular political ideology, or a story of a hero. I think a majority of people who understand this film for what it is are somehow related to the military; have served, is very close to someone who served, or is a sibling or parent or close relative to someone who served, and knows of the trials and tribulations of being in a war and have killed another human being, and the subsequent post traumatic stress (PTS) and eventual struggle with trying to fit back in to society when it's over and they come home and hang up the uniform. To me, that was the key to Bradley Cooper performance, his portrayal of a fighting soldier coming home and trying to fit back into a society where most don't understand what he went through and the turmoil that goes on in the mind of a PTS victim.

One of the most intense scenes in the film does have combat action shots cut into it, when Kyle's wife is talking to his satellite phone that's laying on the ground and she is clearly pregnant. The point of view of the spouse to war, left behind to fend with keeping a household, and ultimately dealing with the shattered mind of the returning soldier.

[DarkImbecile]

Most people miss what American Sniper is really about. It's not a fluff piece for a particular political ideology, or a story of a hero. I think a majority of people who understand this film for what it is are somehow related to the military; have served, is very close to someone who served, or is a sibling or parent or close relative to someone who served, and knows of the trials and tribulations of being in a war and have killed another human being, and the subsequent post traumatic stress (PTS) and eventual struggle with trying to fit back in to society when it's over and they come home and hang up the uniform. To me, that was the key to Bradley Cooper performance, his portrayal of a fighting soldier coming home and trying to fit back into a society where most don't understand what he went through and the turmoil that goes on in the mind of a PTS victim.

One of the most intense scenes in the film does have combat action shots cut into it, when Kyle's wife is talking to his satellite phone that's laying on the ground and she is clearly pregnant. The point of view of the spouse to war, left behind to fend with keeping a household, and ultimately dealing with the shattered mind of the returning soldier.

I addressed this briefly above in an already too-long post, but while Kyle's post-traumatic stress is absolutely one of the focal points of the film, the script and/or Eastwood present such a sanitized, glossed-over version of that disorder and its impact on Kyle and his family that it plays more like yet another obstacle conquered, heroically and without much obvious effort, than a powerful depiction of a problem endemic to many tens of thousands of returning veterans. By refusing to attribute this psychological struggle to anything beyond his remorse over his fallen comrades, and by allowing Kyle to overcome it with little more than some mentoring of wounded veterans and his sheer force of will, the script trivializes the emotional depth that Cooper brings to the role and the scenes that allow him to depict some measure of fragility or vulnerability.

Having known a veteran or two with PTSD myself and read extensively on the issue, I would have to call hyperbole on any description of what we see Cooper's character going through that describes him as having "the shattered mind of the returning soldier"; a more honest depiction of a character meeting that description would have made for a much better and more valuable film than the one we got.

[warren oates]

But I feel like this is where you're just asking to have seen a different movie. Kyle is a character who's by nature very unselfaware. His motivations are simple without becoming simplistic. At best he's not very articulate.

Spoiler

By all accounts -- especially those of the screenwriter (who began working on this story before the book was even written and continued on after Kyle's untimely death) and Kyle's widow -- he was only really just beginning to decompress and to process some of his war time experience almost two years out, at the moment his life was taken. So you're essentially asking for the bulk of the film to be a domestic drama that takes place between the film's last few scenes and it's tragic coda.

And you're banking on the fact that Eastwood -- who usually isn't known for plumbing the depths of his characters' psyches or any sort of indulgence in surreal imagery -- will find some sort of super subtle Bressonian way into Kyle's head. It seems to me Eastwood goes about as far as he can with this, with moments like the track around Kyle "watching" TV, with his encounters with other vets, with his psychiatrist interview. It's almost like you think we're supposed to just believe what Kyle says about himself at every moment, to take it all at face value? Or that Eastwood does? Or that Kyle doesn't strike you as supremely troubled by this first two kills, or haunted by the prospect of having to perhaps repeat them at a later moment? Or completely unsure that he's the "hero" the guy at the auto shop says he is? Or not even quite buying into the b.s. he offers his wife about why his buddy died (because he started doubting the war they were fighting in).

There's a very good new book about PTSD, The Evil Hours by David Morris, and if the author, both a vet and a war correspondent, has any grand point to make it's almost the Tolstoyan premise that everyone's PTSD is different and so there can be no one single way out of it that works for everyone either. I don't see why we should need to see Kyle have some kind of nervous breakdown to get that it's not really normal for him to be spending almost all of his newfound time on the homefront shooting guns with other vets under the pretext that he's merely "helping" them.

[D50]

I addressed this briefly above in an already too-long post, but while Kyle's post-traumatic stress is absolutely one of the focal points of the film, the script and/or Eastwood present such a sanitized, glossed-over version of that disorder and its impact on Kyle and his family that it plays more like yet another obstacle conquered, heroically and without much obvious effort, than a powerful depiction of a problem endemic to many tens of thousands of returning veterans. By refusing to attribute this psychological struggle to anything beyond his remorse over his fallen comrades, and by allowing Kyle to overcome it with little more than some mentoring of wounded veterans and his sheer force of will, the script trivializes the emotional depth that Cooper brings to the role and the scenes that allow him to depict some measure of fragility or vulnerability.

Having known a veteran or two with PTSD myself and read extensively on the issue, I would have to call hyperbole on any description of what we see Cooper's character going through that describes him as having "the shattered mind of the returning soldier"; a more honest depiction of a character meeting that description would have made for a much better and more valuable film than the one we got.

Spoiler

With the extreme end of the PTS spectrum saved for last.

[DarkImbecile]

But I feel like this is where you're just asking to have seen a different movie.

I get your point, though I was more refuting the idea that understanding that Kyle's character is suffering from PTSD is the secret key to unlocking the meaning and value of the movie than arguing that it should have been one way or another (my last sentence in that post notwithstanding).

And you're banking on the fact that Eastwood -- who usually isn't known for plumbing the depths of his characters' psyches or any sort of indulgence in surreal imagery -- will find some sort of super subtle Bressonian way into Kyle's head.

I don't think I was the one banking on that as much as the people making the film were. I think if anyone wants to argue that there is a good movie centered around the war's impact on Kyle's psyche buried somewhere in American Sniper, I wouldn't disagree; my point is that the good movie stayed buried.

Spoiler

With the extreme end of the PTS spectrum saved for last.

At the risk of backing myself into the same "...but I wanted a different movie!" trap, it sure would have been interesting to have explored those two veterans' relative places on that spectrum.

[matrixschmatrix]

If the argument at hand is 'this movie is simplistic, jingoistic propaganda celebrating the many strengths and victories of a man remarkable mostly for the number of Iraqis he killed'- which was DarkImbecile's original premise- than whether it is characteristic of Eastwood to be disinterested in the interiority of his characters or not is irrelevant. Basically, D50 was positing a different movie than the one DarkImbecile describes- one in which the action in Iraq is neither heroic nor evil, but an amoral experience interesting for its effect on a survivor- and I don't think you can have that movie without focusing intensely on the mental and emotional state of the lead. Moreover, if his description of the weight given to the action itself is accurate, it's hard to see the inclusion of PTSD as anything other than an additional element of heroism, an manifestation of the moral burden taken on by the heroic man of action protecting his hearth and home.

[warren oates]

Unless we disagree with DarkImbecile's characterization of the film. It seems to me that detractors on the left and boosters on the right are both missing the point. I can't even hold with DarkImbecile's favorable comparison of Lone Survivor, a film whose meretriciously violent hagiography of every SEAL was styled in full florid cinematic Bayhem. Even though both films end with a nearly pornographic memorial montage, the relative restraint of most of the rest of Eastwood's direction couldn't stand in starker contrast.

American Sniper is not mindless propaganda, but a kind of straightforward, laconic procedural about a skilled solider deploying to a forever war. It's a film about the effects of a violent life on its protagonist that doesn't patronize viewers with long white elephant speechifying (Unforgiven) about what it's all supposed to mean, but instead shows us a proud, stoic, inarticulate man keeping all of that to himself. If Kyle's initial motivation for service is uncomplicated and unquestioned, his deep ambivalence about the results is not. Could the film have benefited from just one or two brief pointed glimpses inside of Kyle's troubled mind? Probably. Would that likely have required a Raging Bull-level commitment and collaboration from the writer, director and lead actor, especially to get something that was true to the real life character and not a cliche? Yeah. So, okay, it's not one of the greatest masterpieces in all of cinema. It's still aiming way higher than DarkImbecile, other detractors and, perhaps, even many of the film's fans are giving it credit for.

Here's Ignatiy Vishnevetsky with a different take on the same aspect of Kyle's character: "Instead of giving him an ah-ha moment of self-awareness, the movie preserves this essential part of his character, and then plays it against him, perhaps too subtly for most tastes."

The film was made in about 40 days with a budget that was nearly half of the 100 million plus that Spielberg felt he needed to do the job (which is why he left the project). And, yeah, some of the time and money pressure shows. And some of it is also Eastwood's standard settling for "good enough." If the VFX are bad, none of them are demonstratively worse than the equally bad ones in Letters from Iwo Jima. Yet American Sniper is still almost that good a film. It's easily top ten Eastwood. Maybe top five.

[colinr0380]

Unless we disagree with DarkImbecile's characterization of the film. It seems to me that detractors on the left and boosters on the right are both missing the point. I can't even hold with DarkImbecile's favorable comparison of Lone Survivor, a film whose meretriciously violent hagiography of every SEAL was styled in full florid cinematic Bayhem. Even though both films end with a nearly pornographic memorial montage, the relative restraint of most of the rest of Eastwood's direction couldn't stand in starker contrast.

How does it compare to that Navy SEAL acted Act of Valor film?

[warren oates]

Oh my god, Act of Valor actually is the sort of mindless propaganda that people are wrongly accusing this one of being. There's maybe one or two good procedural moments in that film, but the rest is unbearably awful. Like a nonstop recruiting ad. Lone Survivor isn't nearly that irredeemable. I just wouldn't cite it as a paragon of war filmmaking either. And it does seem weird to me that anyone would use it to bash American Sniper by way of comparison, since Peter Berg seems unabashedly all-in for the SEALs -- both philosophically and aesthetically -- in a way that it would never even occur to Eastwood to be.

[DarkImbecile]

How does it compare to that Navy SEAL acted Act of Valor film?

American Sniper, to its eternal credit, is not nearly as bad as that film, which much more perfectly fits the description of simplistic, jingoistic, blatant propaganda often attributed to Sniper. I actually don't think Eastwood's film deserves those specific epithets; it's less consciously propagandistic than filled with unquestioned assumptions that tend to lean in one ideological direction.

Unless we disagree with DarkImbecile's characterization of the film. It seems to me that detractors on the left and boosters on the right are both missing the point. I can't even hold with DarkImbecile's favorable comparison of Lone Survivor, a film whose meretriciously violent hagiography of every SEAL was styled in full florid cinematic Bayhem.

I would dispute that the style of Lone Survivor was as over-caffeinated and deliriously non-sensical as your standard piece of Bayhem, but I'm especially stunned that you'd call LS "meretriciously violent" in comparison to a film in which

Spoiler

an Iraqi child is tortured with a power drill to the knee before having it shoved into his skull.

Care to explain the distinction?

American Sniper is not mindless propaganda, but a kind of straightforward, laconic procedural about a skilled solider deploying to a forever war. It's a film about the effects of a violent life on its protagonist that doesn't patronize viewers with long white elephant speechifying (Unforgiven) about what it's all supposed to mean, but instead shows us a proud, stoic, inarticulate man keeping all of that to himself.... So, okay, it's not one of the greatest masterpieces in all of cinema. It's still aiming way higher than DarkImbecile, other detractors and, perhaps, even many of the film's fans are giving it credit for.

I'm not failing to give the film credit for where it aims (and I'm not sure your description of what the film is about aims any higher than what I described), but I'm definitely criticizing it for how short it falls. Like I said, there are many ways to have made this story into a compelling, meaningful film, I just don't think Eastwood managed to do so.

The film was made in about 40 days with a budget that was nearly half of the 100 million plus that Spielberg felt he needed to do the job (which is why he left the project). And, yeah, some of the time and money pressure shows. And some of it is also Eastwood's standard settling for "good enough." If the VFX are bad, none of them are demonstratively worse than the equally bad ones in Letters from Iwo Jima. Yet American Sniper is still almost that good a film. It's easily top ten Eastwood. Maybe top five.

Wow... Eastwood's made a hell of a lot of excellent films that to me belong in another league from what he's done here. I'd love to hear what you think he's done with Sniper that places it on a footing with the rest of his work; you've mostly been responding to me and other critics, so I don't have a good sense of the value you're finding in the film.

[warren oates]

My main problem with Lone Survivor isn't what it's about, it's in how it's about it -- mostly the way the action is filmed. It's just that, visually, everything is turned up to 11, especially once the shots start flying. There isn't a single bullet hit to one of the good guys that isn't immortalized in slow motion. And their deaths are choreographed like the toppling of an ancient alien god in some histrionic space opera. The only truly terrible visual choices in American Sniper (like the way that enemy sniper is killed) are on par with the ickiness of images Peter Berg offers up in just about every moment of his film. It's like Black Hawk Down but without any taste or judgment. Which is weird, because I don't mind Berg's The Kingdom. I also think Wahlberg is deliriously miscast and delivers what's an uncharacteristically bad performance in the lead role.

From American Sniper, I expected a straightforward procedural about a long-serving solider doing multiple tours and that's what I got. Another of the film's strengths, I think, is showing what the worst house-to-house fighting in Iraq actually felt like, something I haven't seen in another fiction film before. I wasn't anticipating a great drama about internal struggles or disillusionment with the nature of the war in Iraq (which, in any case, not that it matters, I never supported). I'm not really interested in writing a more detailed or impassioned defense of the film because it's neither a masterpiece nor a particular personal favorite. I just think it's far from the trash it's being denigrated as. And, like I've been trying to say, to make an honest film about a protagonist who's driven and yet unselfaware and inarticulate is harder than it looks. The degree of difficulty triples if you are both constrained by real-life details and you want us to really get a glimpse of his insides, like we have briefly for a moment or two in a film like Raging Bull.

As for Eastwood's career as a director, I've found it pretty uneven. His best film for me is The Outlaw Josey Wales hands down. Rounding out the top tier would be High Plains Drifter, Unforgiven (in spite of all the on-the-nose speechifying) and Letters From Iwo Jima. A step down from those titles is a long list of everything else. And if, I don't know, The Gauntlet gets to hang out near the top of that list, then so does American Sniper.

[DarkImbecile]

Another of the film's strengths, I think, is showing what the worst house-to-house fighting in Iraq actually felt like, something I haven't seen in another fiction film before.

Interesting... for all of its stylized affectations, I thought Lone Survivor did a much better job in depicting the realities of its respective type of warfare (minus the completely fabricated final battle) than Sniper did with urban Iraq combat. For a sense of the worst house-to-house fighting in Iraq (including depictions of several of the battle zones depicted in Sniper, and from several ideological perspectives), I'd recommend The Forever War by Dexter Filkins, The Good Soldiers by David Finkel, and No True Glory by Bing West, in that order.

His best film for me is The Outlaw Josey Wales hands down.

... and now we're in total agreement. Case closed.

[warren oates]

Ha, looks like we have the same reading list. I agree with your recommendations and I'd add House to House by David Bellavia and Phil Klay's well-deserved National Book Award winner Redeployment.

To be clear, I don't think American Sniper is anything close to the definitive film about urban combat in Iraq. And I still believe that the real-life narrative behind Lone Survivor could have made for an excellent film, perhaps with a different actor in the lead and another director, maybe someone like Paul Greengrass (who unfortunately seems to have played his war card on that underbaked flop Green Zone).

Spoiler

Really, stumbling on the Afghans like that is literally a scenario straight out of special forces/special operations training. It's like the Kobayashi Maru of thorny problems for small units behind enemy lines -- there's no right answer and an equal array of disastrous possibilities.

[Roger_Thornhill]

How some Iraqis responded to American Sniper.

My thoughts on the film were based on both my personal experiences and the film itself. I'm the son of a Marine Vietnam War combat vet who still suffers terribly from PTSD. Growing up with a father who was torn apart by the war mentally and seeing that anguish reflect in his increasingly worse alcoholism and estrangement from the family made watching American Sniper an difficult experience, to say the least. Like Kyle, my father was able to eventually control his PTSD because it never really goes away. The pain, the regret, the sadness will be with them forever and it's something that people like myself who have never served (or let alone been in war) cannot fully comprehend.

Having said that, I appreciated how Eastwood did not turn the film into an endless series of Kyle shooting Iraqis in the head. That would become tedious and dull and pornographic and truly would've led creedence to Seth Rogen's tongue-in-cheek tweet about the film. I also liked the measured pace, the increasing ambiguity, and the fine performances. I didn't even notice that the baby looked fake nor did I mind the CGI. I realized that the Iraqis weren't exactly presented in a favorable fashion, but the film is from Kyle's point-of-view so that made sense to me.

Regarding some of the criticisms:
1. The Iraqis are referred to as savages in both the book and the film. How is that surprising? They're in the midst of a brutal and terrifying guerrilla war that should never have happened had Bush not foolishly invaded. If anything the film is being honest about how a lot of the troops felt during the war.
2. The film seems to suggest that the Iraqis were connected to the 9/11 attacks. I didn't see that at all, what I saw was a man who was disgusted by the attacks and how those attacks led to war. Like it or not, 9/11 led to the Iraq War even though Saddam's government had no involvement in it whatsoever.
3. It's pro-Iraq War. That I don't understand given all that Kyle and his mates went through in Iraq. He comes back after his final tour a broken and confused and angry man. How could anyone interpret American Sniper as a ringing endorsement of Bush's and Blair's folly is beyond me.
4. Kyle is a liar. The man suffered from PTSD and anyone who knows someone with PTSD knows that people say and do strange and hurtful things. I'm not going to knock the guy for probably lying about punching Jesse Ventura (no pun intended).

To me it seems like a lot of the criticisms of the film are based more on Kyle himself and not the film. The film itself fictionalizes many aspects of his tour and life

Spoiler

(the sniper dual never happened, for instance)

, so I personally think the film should be judged on its own merits and not based on whether or not Kyle is a liar or a 'psychopathic patriot' (truly an odious thing to say, I believe). I don't think American Sniper is a great movie or a litmus test for patriotism or a pro-Iraq War propaganda piece, rather I find it simply to be an interesting, balanced, well-acted film about a man who went through hell and high water over his beliefs in country, family, and friends. Is that a simplistic way of thinking and behaving? Perhaps, yes, and I think Eastwood subtly criticizes such simplistic beliefs. Also the fact that Eastwood is still making interesting and relevant films at the age of 85 to me is nothing short of astonishing.

[jindianajonz]

I finally saw this film, and like some of the others here I think that those who think the whole thing is a right-wing fantasy aren't looking deeply enough. Aside from the fact that Eastwood was against both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and has called his work here "the biggest anti-war statement a film can make", there is more than enough at the periphery of this film to call the view that it is a right-wing fantasy into question. Sure, it may be tough to hear our troops refer to Iraqis as savages, but this language struck me as authentic and to remove it would be dishonest. We see our troops barge into a mans house and punch him in the face even though he ends up being willing to help them, and eventually loses both his life and his sons as a result. Our troops, ostensibly heroes, still travel around the city in vehicles painted with skulls that, in most Hollywood films, would be more suited on Nazi vehicles. I think the movie also goes to great lengths to connect Kyle to the rival sniper- both extremely killed, both seen shooting young boys- and when Kyle finally kills him, he momentarily believes he has killed the demon inside himself, though his return home proves this to be wishful thinking.

I agree that Kyle comes across as a flawless superman, but seeing as this story is more about PTSD than anything else, I think that's an important characteristic. Had he made mistakes in the line of duty, it would be very easy to confuse PTSD with guilt, and in a military where PTSD is still heavily stigmatized and soldiers leave fake "Hurt Feelings Reports" at psychiatric hosptials (with check boxes such as "I want my mommy," "I'm a pussy," and "I have woman like hormones") it's important to be precise about what is afflicting him- it's a pretty bold statement to say that even people as unequivocally heroic as movie-Kyle may need therapy (and as much as the movie elided over Kyle's healing process, I think it is clear that therapy is what helped turn him around, not some innate inner strength or "sucking it up".) Eastwood could have beaten us over the head with the consequences of PTSD, but instead he plays it subtle (nobody has mentioned the presence of beer bottles in every scene between Kyle returning him and his first visit to the therapist), which I think will help make this film more accessible to the people who most need to see it. If it takes some faux right-wing action to get military asses in the seats, then I am all for it, but to say that's all this movie is misses the point completely.

EDIT: Fixed link. That second read is a great one, btw.

Also, one PTSD sympton that wasn't explicitly touched on is when Kyle is back in the US and seems to panic when a white van passes him on the freeway. It's been noted that a PTSD sympton unique to these recent wars is related to driving- for the first time, our troops spent a lot of time in cars in other countries, and when they come back being on the road is likely to trigger flashbacks. The way Eastwood connected the van passing to Kyle's time in Iraq was subtle but effective.

[domino harvey]

With Warner Archives' great track record this year of getting out so many classics onto Blu-ray for the first time, it's easy to forget where Warners' priorities lie: Double-dip "commemorative edition" coming in May