Whether you view American Sniper as a war movie or an anti-war movie depends largely upon the opinions you already have when you walk into the theater. The film, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Bradley Cooper, is a faithful but flawed adaptation of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle’s best selling autobiography. Chris Kyle has become something of a legend in the military, partly due to his reputation as “the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S Military History” and partly due to the fact that in 2013, he was murdered by an unstable young veteran suffering from PTSD. The film opened to a record breaking $105 million at the box office and earned a surprising six Oscar nominations, including Best Actor, Best Director, and Best Picture. It has also already sparked it’s fair share of controversy, with Seth Rogen tweeting that it reminded him of the fake Nazi propaganda film in Inglorious Basterds and New York Magazine’s David Edelstein dubbing it a “Republican Platform Movie.” Whatever your perspective, the truth is that the film itself will do absolutely nothing to drastically alter your understanding of the American military, the life of an American soldier, or America’s current war in the Middle East. You will walk out of the theater believing what you already believe. American Sniper remains far too safe, straight, and simplistic to achieve anything greater.
When I first saw the trailer for American Sniper back in the fall, I remember being excited and impressed. The trailer, which is really just the first few minutes of the film, begins with Kyle sitting a top a building in Iraq with his gun, stoically surveying the desolate and rubble-filled streets below. Suddenly, a woman and her young son appear outside of a building holding something that is later revealed to be an explosive device. Kyle must make the split second decision to either kill a young boy and his mother or risk endangering the American troops bellow. His fellow sniper turns to him and says, “They fry you if you’re wrong. They’ll send your ass to Levenworth.” Before we know what Kyle decides, the trailer ends. I loved the trailer; I thought it was bold, intense, and imbued with a thrilling urgency and moral ambiguity. If a similar tone of tension and uncertainty had continued throughout the film, I think American Sniper could have been truly great. Unfortunately, Eastwood fails to maintain these elements beyond the first few moments and what could have been seminal becomes merely mediocre.
At best, American Sniper offers a superficial critique of war. It condemns the horrors combat ravages on American soldiers both physically and mentally but does little to grapple with the existing power structures and belief systems that force those soldiers to fight in the first place. None of the characters in the film question the war and Eastwood doesn’t seem to either. Kyle was inspired to enlist by the 1998 attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and is sprung into further action after 9/11. That is apparently all the information and context we need to know. From the moment the film begins with “Allah Ahkbar” echoing ominously over a black screen, we are plunged into the dark and primitive world of the exoticized other. Kyle refers to the Iraqis as savages and though it is safe to assume that Eastwood does not share this pejorative view, the Iraqis almost never become more than a blinking point at the end of Kyle’s gun.
American Sniper is a brilliant example of the way enemy-making works in the 21st century. The enemies in American Sniper are barbarians, criminals, torturers, sadists, little boys with bazookas, and tiny but potentially lethal points miles away in the distance. They are not human. In Faces of the Enemy, Sam Keen says that in order to kill the enemy, we must first dehumanize them, and in order for the soldiers who do the killing to live with their actions, we must convert the act of murder into an act of patriotism. While I do not think that American Sniper necessarily wants us to believe, like Chris, that all Iraqis are savages, it doesn’t provide the audience with enough information to prove otherwise. Intentional or not, war in American Sniper isn’t complex or morally ambiguous. It’s actually quite simple: Americans are good, Iraqis are bad. While I am relieved that no audience members applauded when those pesky Iraqi terrorists were shot (at least we have progressed that far), the film was nonetheless seriously lacking in any substantial, or even unsubstantial, inquiry into who we are fighting and why we are fighting them. As our enemies become distant targets at the end of a riffle or blimps on a screen before a drone strike, these questions remain more relevant than ever.
Another one of the reasons American Sniper remains so hopelessly superficial is that it attempts to cover Chris Kyle’s entire life, from his childhood to his untimely death. A hefty two hour and fourteen minute running time still somehow manages to feel too short to give the story, characters, and ideas the attention they deserve. By trying to say everything, Eastwood ends up saying absolutely nothing. Civilian Americans are desperately in need of insight into the lives of our soldiers and what they go through before, during, and after duty and films have a special duty to shed light on these issues in a truthful yet provocative and challenging way. Less than 1% of Americans currently serve in the military. As James Fallow wrote in his recent piece in the Atlantic, “The country thinks too rarely, and too highly, of the 1% percent under fire in our name.” American Sniper reflects this attitude of reverent but disengaged appreciation that most American civilians feel towards our men and women in uniform. The film is important because it attempts to tell the story of a member of that 1%, but I still felt like I walked away from the theater knowing and understanding nothing more about our Middle East and the people who fight them than I had before.
American Sniper may be a true story, but it obscures the truth. I generally find realist war films like American Sniper and the work of Katherine Bigelow incredibly dangerous because they steamroll over the myriad of war’s ambiguities in favor of fact-based clarity. I like my war films allegorical and absurd. You need a ridiculous and surreal movie in order to portray just how ridiculous and surreal war can really be. There has yet to be a great film about the wars in the Middle East, and until we do away with straight documentary realism, I don’t think there will be.
The Next Picture Show 