[Nosferatu@Cult Labs]

American Sniper (2014)

Based on the book American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History, a memoir by former U.S. Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, a man with 160 confirmed kills was written for the screen by Jason Hall and directed by Clint Eastwood. It plays around with timeline, beginning in Iraq with Kyle looking down the scope on his sniper rifle as a military age man with a cellphone appears on a balcony overlooking a group of Marines entering the town. As Kyle relays what he sees, the man disappears and a woman and young boy exit the building onto the road, with the woman obviously carrying something – a large grenade – as she walks towards the troops with her son. Kyle asks if his superiors – probably watching drone footage – have a visual and, when they reply they don't, say it's his call.

The film then flashes back to Kyle growing up, being taught to hunt by his father and then enlisting in the Navy after the Al Qaeda bombings of US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. After graduating and becoming a sniper in the SEALs, Kyle marries and, after the September 11 attacks, is deployed to Iraq, earning the nickname 'Legend' due to his unerring accuracy and reputation. As the military is on the hunt for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Kyle learns there is a bounty on his head and he is being targeted by 'Mustafa" a Syrian marksman and Olympic medallist.

American Sniper is a peculiar film because it's not as intense as Black Hawk Down, nor does it have the dramatic tension of Enemy at the Gates. I also didn't think it was as intelligent a look at warfare as Jarhead (also based on a book by a former sniper) or, in terms of the 'War on Terror', Zero Dark Thirty. It also feels disjointed because it permanently struggles to reconcile Clint Eastwood's more nuanced worldview with Chris Kyle's much more Manichaean outlook, which appears to take precedence and will probably sit well with those who sympathise with the 'us against them' simplification of the problems with terrorists and criminals who follow a violent and radical form of Islam. There are some extremely well designed and shot sequences, and Bradley Cooper is very good, but it is extremely mediocre for a film nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, and the scenes with a doll instead of a real baby are almost inexplicable in a fairly big budget Hollywood film – the doll is extremely distracting and unintentionally amusing.

I understand why some will see it as propaganda, as it would be easy for it to be used for those purposes (it finishes with real footage of Chris Kyle's funeral and memorial service), but ultimately just left me with a feeling of "is that it?".

It does its best to tackle the issue of former servicemen adjusting to civilian life with physical and mental scars, but that has also been done better in other films, particularly the documentary Hell and Back Again. Because the film fails to show Iraqis as humans, thus glorifying the war and American combatants – particularly Kyle who described them in his book as 'savages' –American Sniper is deeply troubling.