| SYNOPSIS:
Jarhead
follows "Swoff" (Gyllenhaal), from a sobering stint
in boot camp to active duty, sporting a sniper's rifle through
Middle East deserts with no cover from intolerable heat or
from Iraqi soldiers. Swoff and his fellow Marines who have
been trained to kill, find themselves in a brutal situation,
fighting a war they don't understand for a cause they don't
fully grasp.
MOVIE
REVIEW :
Everyone
loves a war movie, well, most of the time anyway. War movies
are potent chemistry of opportunities and exploration of diversifying
genres. Beyond curbing the blood lust action seek by alpha
males, war movies have famously immortalized romance, kinship
and spoke the most unusual yet memorable dialogues ever offered.
In bullets and mortars, they contemplated life, philosophy,
death, grief and hope under extraordinary situations, thus
spouting more classic dialogues. It’s hard to get a
type of movie that could fit all those sizes of shoe. In short,
war films are almost always every major filmmaker’s
wet dreams.
As
a ‘Jarhead’ (term referring to the Marines), Anthony
Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal) was trained to be a sniper for
the Gulf War. As the days stretched into months in the Saudi
Arabia desert, and more troops were pouring in, preparing
for the showdown against the Iraqi enemies and Saddam, they
began to question their presence and experienced a sense of
desolation and abandonment.
Now,
to watch ‘Jarhead’ anticipating it to be a full-fledged
war movie is purely courting disappointment. Although it was
set in one of the influential war of modern times, yet in
‘Jarhead’, it’s direction was not focused
on the massacre of the war, but rather exploring the prospect
of anticipating war without believing in it. After all, like
the Vietnam War, the Gulf War was fought with humanitarian
purposes rather than for their lives. It is easy for the American
soldiers to experience desolation in a foreign land; plagued
with personal sacrifices and loss, they fall harder. This
is what ‘Jarhead’ is trying to do - a self-discovered
journey of realizing that they are in fact fighting a war
against themselves.
Narrated
morbidly by its protagonist as he sank into a sanity-denying
sandpit of despair. It’s like National Service; where
young boys were sent away to be men, in time to realize their
detachment with society, losing their girlfriends and bond
with the most unusual characters available. In a similar fashion
to films like ‘Buffalo Soldiers’ (2001) and ‘Tigerland’
(2000), ‘Jarhead’ examined the desperate disenchantment
of regimentation and the illusion of their purposes in war
times.
If
you understand and accept that ‘Jarhead’ is a
war film depraved of action and thrill, it would be friendlier
to appreciate this movie for it’s beautiful photography
of the desert and the clever dialogues to start with. Probing
deeper, it would be soon apparent that it’s bland acting
by the two most inane actors of Hollywood (Jake Gyllenhaal
and Peter Sarsgaard) and the absence of twists are causing
the movie of it’s ratings. It was however the last philosophical
line of Swofford’s narration which ties the film’s
shoestring together, saving it from being utterly senseless.
MOVIE
RATING:
 
Review
by Ang Wei Kiat
|
