American Sniper - Bradley Cooper - Clint Eastwood Dir

GBXI wrote: »

Excellent film.

Gimme this over Boyhood or Foxcatcher any day!

I give you that over Foxcatcher, imho dreary and overtly loooooonnnnggg with not a lot happening really, but Boyhood was awesome!!!

Enjoyed it. The actual war side of things really lacked a good story but I think Cooper did well at portraying the bigger side of the story. The end caught me by surprise, I hadn't known the true story going into it.

Definitely a 6.5/7 out of 10 for me.

Err.......

Still possible spoiler alert...........................

He picked people with PTSD............................................

Mental health issues..................................................................

And gave them guns...................................................................................

And it didn't work out well........................................................................................

Err......................................................................................................................................

I'll stay away from the politics of the movie as I don't think I'm as educated on the whole matter as some are here and would not offer a decent opinion or invite discussion on it.

As a movie, yes it was ok. The action could have been better I thought and there was only one scene where I really felt there was real tension was the second child scene with the RPG (the tension was removed from the first child scene by the trailer I thought) and the rooftop scene
I too found the psychologist scene a bit unrealistic, I wish they had expanded on that and the scene with the dog - well I would have liked the movie to show more of that mental breakdown.

It's a 6/10 for me - and as a side note - very surprised how much war was actually in it - thought there would be much more of his home-life - despite four tours. Really interesting that the Punisher and it's logo are present - anyone who has read "Born" will know what I mean.

Fakman87 wrote: »

I thought this was a masterpiece. Bradley Cooper is in my opinion the best actor working today. He really has everything. Handsome but not too handsome, modest and can be really vulnerable at times. It's mad to think that The Hangover launched his career.

Yep he is a great actor.

It was a brutally honest movie even if it was more of an ad campaign for the US forces, but I enjoyed it

[QUOTE

One thing that kept running through my mind was that if you compare this to Enemy at the Gates then Bradley Cooper is identical to Ed Harris' character, while the Iraqi sniper is Jude Law. [/QUOTE]

Except Enemy At The Gates is a great movie with good acting.

It is cleaning up at the US box office

The film engages in propaganda on many levels. From subtle bias in its portrayal of both sides of the conflict to outright lies where the actions of the US military are concerned. It is dangerous and dishonest because it serves as a whitewash of a pretty horrific war and glosses over the true horrors inflicted upon innocent people.

I'll start out by saying that I enjoyed the Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty immensely, though the latter was again slightly one sided, but at least presented with a modicum of integrity. Lone Survivor is fantastic also, though let down by some elements of Mark Wahlberg's performance in the latter half. (All films in the same theater of war that I actually enjoyed)

The first and most obvious piece of propaganda is the lie about Fallujah. This was an entire CITY that was leveled to the ground by the US military and there have been numerous reports of widespread civilian casualties as well as indiscriminate and deliberate targeting of civilians. I remember at the time when this was happening how access to journalists was severely restricted (much more so than in the rest of the war) which has made holding the US to account incredibly difficult.

In the film the siege of Fallujah is dismissed with a single line spoken as they go in. 'All the civillians have been evacuated, and the only people that remain are hardline extremists.'

The implication and tone suggests that the US actively tried to evacuate civilians. In fact, according to the US army what they did was drop leaflets and make loudspeaker announcements (according to them for several days.) Even if this is true the fact remains that all MILITARY AGED MALES were stopped from leaving the city. That means any male over the age of 15. Estimates suggest that there were 30-50K civilians remaining in the city.

The US also made use of illegal chemical weapons. The evidence of this can be seen by googling the term 'Fallujah babies.'

The US have been very successful in covering up the atrocities they committed in Fallujah and this film only helps in that endeavour.

This US soldier's first hand account helps to shed the faintest of lights on what really went on there:

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/10/iraq-fallujah-destruction-alqaida-maliki

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/13/us-marines-video-urination-war-crime

The stories about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the alleged leader of al-Qaida in Iraq who was said to be recruiting an army in Falluja, were wildly exaggerated. There is no evidence that Zarqawi ever even set foot in Falluja.

But a much more powerful, effective and insidious use of propaganda in the film is the portrayal of Kyle's victims.

The opening kill, where he shoots a woman and a child, is not what Kyle himself said in his own book. There was in fact, no child. Eastwood masterfully inserts the child, carrying the bomb, given to him by a woman (who we would naturally presume might be his mother.) And when the child is shot, this woman is so extreme and fanatical that she isn't concerned about him at all, instead she runs to pick up the bomb to throw it at the Americans. In that opening scene, the film sets the stage for its portrayal of the victims of the American invasion, as Kyle so succinctly and repeatedly labels them: 'Savages.'

This also serves to underscore the other main lie and propaganda point of the story. Anyone killed by the Americans was a bad guy who deserved to die and who they HAD to kill in order to save themselves. Whether they were women or children.

This pattern continues throughout the film. The Americans are just trying to do their best to liberate the country in the face of SAVAGE brutality and extremism. They do not torture (which we know they did). It is interesting how not ONE of Kyle's kills shown in the film had any GREY area about it. Are we really to believe that out of the 160-220 people he shot dead there were no instances that in the pressure and battle of war were ambiguous in any way?

This is only mildly approached in a scene where Kyle is questioned about a kill and a woman claims he shot a man who was carrying a Koran. Yet the kill before that (if it refers to the same incident) makes a lie of this woman's complaint. The message is obvious. Any reports from the locals of US atrocities are probably lies.

Where are the good Muslims in the film? The man who shares his home and his meal? Turns out he's hiding a weapon cache in his house and he tries to pick up a gun to fight back the first chance he gets.

Even the informer isn't portrayed in the kindest light. Despite his daughter losing an arm to the butcher, he wants 100k to help them. Not safety or relocation which could be seen as reasonable, but 100k in cash.

And what about opposing view points? The one soldier who offers a liberal perspective and questions (laughingly mildly) the validity of the invasion is promptly killed off. And Kyle gets to tell us all that it was his weakness, because that is what questioning the necessity of America and its armed forces actions in the western world is: Softness, weakness. This is what happens to pinko, liberals.

The rampaging Muslim hordes would wipe us all out if it wasn't for the bravery of heroes like Kyle, standing on the wall with their gun, shooting children about to hurl bombs over our fences. How dare we be so unpatriotic as to question any of this.

One need only watch Eastwood's empty chair speech at the Republican Convention leading up to the last US general election to see where the man's political opinions lie and it is clear that those prejudices have seeped deeply into the narrative of this film.

The film does an excellent job of pandering to the xenophobia and islamophobia currently rampant in Western society and it plays brilliantly on the prejudice and ignorance of those who would be taken in by its facade. Hence its stratospheric commercial success.

It remains however a blatant, dishonest and disgusting piece of war propaganda.

eeguy wrote: »

Also did anyone notice that ever Iraqi Cooper kills is an immediate threat to US soldiers while every kill the Iraqi sniper makes is a US soldier just wandering around or building a wall.

Did you notice on the news the American citizens in civvies lobbing grenades at Iraqi's in Fallujah? Nope, me neither. There didn't tend to be many American insurgents fighting the Iraqi's in Iraq. Tends not to work that way when the war is in Iraq.

According to the book, written as his first hand account of the war, the army engineers building the wall were shot . so that's whats in the film.

His job is to provide overwatch to marines working on the ground. The very nature of that means the people hes shooting are going to be attacking the US soldiers. Or are you suggesting he sat on roof tops just randomly shooting anyone that dared venture on to the streets? You could rack up 160 kills in a day doing that.

For a film that so many go on about being propaganda and an ad for the army, highlighting PTSD, guys dying painfully riddled with bullets or being left maimed is harldy the way to showcase how great the life of a military man is.