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94% buy the item featured on this page: Jarhead (Widescreen Edition) CDN$ 9.99 |
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1% buy The Kingdom CDN$ 14.99 |
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Product Description
From Amazon.com
Based on Anthony Swofford’s excellent memoir about his experiences as a Marine Sniper in Gulf War I, Jarhead is a war movie in which the waiting is a far greater factor upon the characters than the war itself, and the build up to combat is more drama than what combat is depicted. To some viewers hoping for typical movie action, this will seem like a cruel joke. But it’s not. It’s just the story as it was written, and if you liked the book, you will probably like the movie. If you didn’t, then the movie won’t change your mind.
The movie follows the trajectory of Swofford (played with thoughtful intensity by Jake Gyllenhaal) from wayward Marine recruit (he joined because he "got lost on the way to college") to skilled Marine sniper, and on into the desert in preparation for the attack on Iraq. No-nonsense, Marine-for-life Staff Sgt. Sykes (Jamie Foxx), the man who recruited Swofford and his spotter Troy (Peter Sarsgaard) into the sniper team, leads them in training, and in waiting where their lives are dominated by endless tension, pointless exercises in absurdity (like playing football in the scorching heat of the desert in their gas masks so it will look better for the media’s TV cameras), more training, and constant anticipation of the moment to come when they’ll finally get to kill. When the war does come, it moves too fast for Swofford’s sniper team, and the one chance they get at a kill--to do the one thing they’ve trained so hard and waited so long for--eludes them, leaving them to wonder what was the point of all they had endured.
As directed by Sam Mendes (American Beauty), the movie remains very loyal to the language and vision of the book, but it doesn’t entirely work as the film needs something more than a literal translation to bring out its full potential. Mendes’s stark and, at times, apocalyptic visuals add a lot and strike the right tone: wide shots of inky-black oil raining down on the vast, empty desert from flaming oil wells contrasted with close-ups of crude-soaked faces struggling through the mire vividly bring to life the meaning of the tagline "welcome to the suck." But much of the second half of the movie will probably leave some viewers feeling disappointed in the cinematic experience, while others might appreciate its microcosmic depiction of modern chaos and aimlessness. Jarhead is one of those examples where the book is better than the movie, but not for lack of trying. --Dan Vancini
Review
Sam Mendes' Jarhead does not tell a new story. Countless other films have shown how war affects soldiers. Mendes is savvy enough to know this and goes so far as to reference Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now early in the film almost as a way of admitting how pedestrian his basic story is. What sets this film apart is that although the story is old, the characters are new. The characters played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard become real people over the course of the film, making their experiences all the more compelling to an audience. In addition to developing a pair of specific characters, the film smartly teaches the audience more than a few aspects of what daily life was like during Desert Shield and Desert Storm. The film demonstrates the pent-up energy of young men not allowed the release of either sex or war. The soldier's unique war experience is expressed beautifully in the film's final act when, once the men actually get close to real combat, cinematographer Roger Deakins lights the film by the shifting light from fires that burn in sabotaged oil fields. There has never been a film sequence that looks like that one does, just as there has never been a war film quite like Jarhead. The film lacks profundity, but it does contain a specificity that makes it a compelling experience. ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide
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