What I thought of American Sniper

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Zevvion

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Edited By Zevvion

I thought the movie was a pretty good watch. I thought the pace was pretty good, though a little more scenes at home in between each tour would have probably helped. However, I have a feeling that I'll look back on this movie in a pretty sour way. I'm not the type of person that often dislikes movies. I've never walked out a theater and I'm pretty much always entertained. I'm a fan of repetition as long as it's good, so whenever I need to put my feelings about the movie into words, I try to judge it on if I would see it again. This always gives me more insight into what I actually thought of the movie. In the case of American Sniper, while being entertained watching it, it's an immediate and clear 'no' to that question.

Whenever a movie makes me decide to never see it again while I'm still watching it for the first time, it messed up too much, basically. There are parts of the movie I liked, like the trauma taking effect. But everything like that becomes majorly flawed in some form or another, later on. I felt like I was watching a more nuanced version of the old WWII movies that tried to showcase the American effort in the war as heroic, good versus bad, instead of the tragic light grey versus dark grey that war always becomes. I don't recall seeing 'the bad guys' ever take casualties among innocents, unless inflicted by themselves. Reality is far from the showings of the movie in this regard. I would not call it propaganda as some have claimed it to be, but it is definitely a very pro-American made movie, including the hard miss attempt of invoking emotion with the ending title scene, which I did not appreciate very much. I guess I am not the target audience for such a film as I have no brotherly love for one country over another. But it's far from my biggest criticism of the film. It's just flat out dumb in some scenes. Blade is a cool movie because it is clearly a fantasy film. Cool looks and bad-assery are part of the course and they work because of the premise. Even if it is, I was never led to believe that American Sniper was trying to be anything but a realistic film adaptation of real events. As such, the ridiculous attempts at looking 'bad-ass' were just making me cringe.

An example of this (minor spoiler): The flashback showing how the two brothers grew up and were taught by their father about protecting people was the dumbest, most surreal thing I've seen all year. It blasted me out of the movie, picturing the director instructing the kid to remain emotionless while he nods his head, because of some misconceived idea of that being bad-ass.

I did not regret going to see this movie, but I'll never see it again and probably never talk about it again either. If you have 2 hours to kill you won't be bored out of your mind watching this, but they are better spend watching something else.

Rating: 2 / 5