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Well, here we are again. Picking apart modern war movies tends to be something of a thankless task, mainly because most people see what they want to see in them anyway. While some see movies such as Black Hawk Down, 13 Hours and Zero Dark Thirty as dangerous instruments of misguided patriotism, or glorified recruitment propaganda, others see them as thoughtful examples of action cinema where a certain mindset has to be embraced to survive and the only true villain is war itself.
Well, not helping matters much was Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, a 2014 war movie that cover the life and military career of Chris Kyle, a sniper who served four tours in Iraq and racked up 160 confirmed kills making him one of the most prolific snipers in U.S. military history. While loaded with gripping action, solid performances and a famously notiable fake, rubber baby that threatened to overshadow any claims of controversy, Eastwood’s decision to avoid taking any sort of concrete stance on matters ensures that its ambiguous nature proves to be more distracting than anything else.
After witnessing footage of the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings on TV, Texan cowboy and naturally gifted marksman, Chris Kyle, decides to serve the country that he loves and enlists to become a Navy SEAL. After withstanding the brutal special training, he is accepted and eventually becomes a sniper, but at the same time he meets Taya Studebaker in a bar and after hitting it off (and holding her hair back while she vomits), they soon marry. Putting something of a sizable crimp in their plans is the horror of the September 11th attacks that eventually sees Chris sent to Iraq, and his first kill in the field proves to be a woman and child who advance on a patrol of U.S. Marines with an anti-tank grenade. While the facts of the matter are regrettable, Kyle’s continuing dedication to keeping American troops safe grants him the nickname “The Legend” from his peers.
But when Kyle isn’t racking up a sizable amount of confirmed kills, he and his team are tasked to hunt for al-Qaeda leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his right hand man known only as “The Butcher”. However, making this mission infinitely harder is the presence of a Syrian Olympic medalist named Mustafa, who may be every bit the marksman that Chris is. Adding to his pressures is the fact that Taya is pregnant and after returning home for the birth of his first child, we find that he’s having noticable trouble switching off whenever he’s back Stateside. Distracted by the things he’s seen and anxious to return as he believes fellow troops are at risk every moment he’s not in Iraq, Chris finds himself going back time and time again as both a sense of duty and outright guilt drives him to return and take out his targets.
While films often manipulate us into feeling certain things at certain times, that doesn’t mean that cinema should tell us how to think – but there are times when you’d just wish American Sniper would pick a lane and get behind it. I’m not saying that Clint Eastwood’s pretty loose biopic of Chris Kyle would be better or worse if it fully dedicated itself to either vigorous flag waving and hero worship, or stood as an anti-war film that warns of the dangers of PTSD, but it seems that the director is trying so hard to be ambiguous about where his film stands, he ends up landing closer to vague. I get that good old Clint is aiming to just present the facts and let us make up our own minds (which is why so many people can have wildly differing takes on the film), but surely this ends up being somewhat of a problem when some of those facts have been altered for cinema. For example, Kyle never actually had a running grudge match against the rival sniper known as Mustafa and his buddy “Biggles” never actually died – so if you’re coming at American Sniper looking for straight truths, you’re probably looking in the wrong place.
But regardless of your personal feelings about Kyle and whatever emotions this film manages to evoke, Eastwood has nevertheless made a solid, modern war movie that touches enough bases in order to qualify as a jack-of-all-trades. It certainly seems to want to tread in the footsteps of Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, especially during scenes where Kyle is visibly despondent about being back home with his family, but Eastwood repeatedly muddies the waters without a clear reason to do so. Literally the first thing we see our lead character do is draw a bead on a young child armed with a sizable explosive device – and yet while multiple characters in the film repeatedly tell us that shooting a child was the right thing to do, we don’t get much of a sense of what the film expects us to feel about it. It certainly isn’t condemning Kyle for his actions (he undoubtedly saves the lives of his fellow troops), but Eastwood also seems unwilling to condemn the war and its effects either, and shooting a kid it’s a helluva jump for an audience to make if you’re not going to bring up some sort of clear point.
Still, while the film bounces uncertainly between praising it’s lead character while simultaneously showing the mental strain war takes on the emotions, the performances stay strong and the action remains intense. As Kyle, Bradley Cooper manages to purge the cocky funster of The Hangover and The A-Team out of his repertoire and alternates from a trained killing machine to a man lost when confronted with normality. Similarly, Sienna Miller handles worried housewife duties well, but like many other war movies, the majority of Kyle’s comrades in arms tend to be able to blend into the background without the aid of camouflage. Worse yet, Eastwood can’t avoid demonising the enemy to an extent that verges on uncomfortable – but anyone showing up for some tense stand-offs between dueling sharpshooters or some gritty gunfights will be well served by the setpieces that Eastwood cleanly lays out.
And yet – again – maybe if the veteran director was willing to commit to a clear stance, it would be easier to have of an opinion on the film itself. I know what I think and feel about the contradictory nature of being a killer for your country, but the film, but being complex isn’t the same as this confusing jumble of conflicting tones that serve to make it more awkward than anything else. There’s probably a great film to be found within American Sniper, despite its (ironic) reluctance to pull any sort of trigger, but I’ll be damned if Eastwood is willing, or even able, to find it. Instead we have scenes of audience rousing, cheer bating bullet time, that follows a round to it’s target and utterly contradicts any of the war is hell stuff that surrounds it.
There are ways to hail heroes while vilifying the results of war, but maybe selecting a real-life sniper to do it was beyond even the directorial powers of Clint Eastwood. While there’s certainly positives here in the performances and the action, the decision to remain partially on the fence means that some of the more unsavoury actions of war are glamorised to a certain extent. Yes, doing unspeakable things during wartime to protect your comrades is necessary in the grand scheme of things, but don’t expect me to be happy about it.
