Welcome to the you fuckin suck

Ok so this is a partial review of jarhead because I lost the enthusiasm and drive to finish it. So here is what I wrote and you can get the jist of how I felt with this film.


So I went to see a midnight showing of Jarhead on opening night. I was interested in seeing what Pat Jackson did with the sound. In any case, I can describe this movie in one word – convoluted.
I went in expecting an anti-war (lets make the marines look as mentally unstable as possible) kind of film. Thankfully this is not exactly what I saw, but the film starts exactly where the film ends with the main character hating the marines without any real resolution other that this character obviously shouldn’t have been a marine.
While this film had great performances from both Jake Gyllinhall and Peter Saarsgard. The motivation of Gyllinhall’s character seems somewhat misguided. It seems that his character joins the marines because of a woman. Once he is in the marines, there is no 1950’s WW2 propaganda glory (the same message of every anti-war film made in the last 40 years). The character seems to not really know why he joins and has no real pride in what he is doing. This comes across as if he has nothing better to do, or as his character says when asked why he joined the marines, “I got lost on my way to college.”
His character develops into an anti-authority wise-ass through out the film, except for the portions during his sniper training and his roll as a sniper in desert storm. The character takes a complete 180-degree turn as a sniper, in these scenes; the character has found a purpose and something that he is good at. He takes pride in the fact that he is a marine sniper. Now the filmmakers could be attempting to show that this as a way to visualize the cliché notion of how the marines break you down, and build you back up as a killing machine.
There are many scenes It failed to make any real point, it settled for happily dancing around the issues it wanted to bring up without committing to a point of view.
This film ultimately fails as a political film, and really is a story of a scared individual who has no idea who he is or what he wants to do, and blames the military for his trouble.