BEFORE: I was all set to link to "Syriana" via Viola Davis, but part of following the plan means I have to know when to divert from the plan as well - I've got about 7 or 8 recent acquisitions at the bottom of the list, and the other night I went through their cast lists. This allowed me to notice that this film (which I got to go along with "Lone Survivor" and "American Sniper", as soon as some channel runs that second one) shares an actor with last night's film and another with what is now tomorrow's film. So Jake Gyllenhaal carries over from "Prisoners" instead.
This worked out well, because I had run out of caffeinated diet soda, which meant that staying awake for a treatise on the state of the oil industry might have been a tough slog, but an action-packed war movie might keep me from falling asleep. Also, it turns two nights of war films into three nights of war films, to coincide with the three-day Memorial Day weekend. Seems like it was meant to be.
THE PLOT: Based on former Marine Anthony Swofford's best-selling 2003 book about his pre-Desert Storm experiences in Saudi Arabia and about his experiences fighting in Kuwait.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Kingdom" (Movie #1,178), "Three Kings" (Movie #316)
AFTER: First, a brief history of war, from my perspective. There was World War I (yeah, I know there were earlier wars, but that was the first modern war), only they didn't call it that at the time, they called it "The War to End All Wars", only it didn't. Then there was World War II, which created the "Greatest Generation" and put Germans back in their place, and that didn't end war either, but it led to some great movies being made. Then we had the Korean War, which led to a great TV series, and Vietnam, which led to some more great movies.
I got really lucky, in that I was much too young to understand Vietnam, let alone serve there, and by the time Gulf War I rolled around, I was 22 and a semi-productive member of the workforce. There were plenty of young men willing to enlist - funny how that worked, you just keep college tuition high and don't do anything about unemployment rates, and boom, there's your army. But this film reminds us that warfare became very different in the 1990's, with the use of technology like smart bombs, it was the first time war was waged by computers, and combat operations took just five weeks. That is, if you don't count the five months of operation in Saudi Arabia prior to combat in Iraq.
This film is largely about Operation Desert Shield, which was that five months of relative downtime, where trained military personnel were deployed with little to do but train in the field, following a rigorous routine of hydration and preparation. Combat can kill you, but routine can break you. So they go a little mad in the desert, waiting for something, anything to happen. Conversations turn to what the soldiers could be doing if they weren't in the military, and who their wives and girlfriends might be doing back in the States.
Finally, Desert Shield turns to Desert Storm, and the Marines march through the aftermath of the Coalition's bombing campaign, and get to a place where it literally rains oil. The Marine snipers are given an important mission at last, only to have it turn out to be something else. Some of them then realize they've made it through an entire war without ever firing their rifles. Truly, this is war for the slacker generation - war is often fought by the best and brightest people who couldn't avoid it, so it's good to know that those people can succeed at it with minimal effort.
Naturally, any film that starts in basic training and ends with war as a metaphor for madness calls to mind other films like "Full Metal Jacket", and to a lesser extent, "The Deer Hunter" and "Apocalypse Now", both of which are referenced by "Jarhead" by having the Marines watch them. I can't say this is really in the same ballpark as those films, but I think there may be a group of people who are very gung-ho about "Jarhead" and fail to grasp its larger meaning, simply because the film wasn't as blatantly anti-war as it could have been - like the way "Platoon" was an anti-war war film. This one's mainly anti-war, because, well, where's the war?
Also starring Jamie Foxx (last seen in "Django Unchained"), Peter Sarsgaard (last seen in "Blue Jasmine"), Lucas Black (last seen in "42"), Brian Geraghty, John Krasinski (last heard in "Monsters University"), Evan Jones (last seen in "8 Mile"), Dennis Haysbert (last seen in "Random Hearts"), Chris Cooper (last seen in "August: Osage County"), Ivan Fenyo, Jacob Vargas, Laz Alonso, Brianne Davis.
RATING: 5 out of 10 fighting scorpions
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