By Mike Cicchetti SPECIAL TO THE CHRONICLE
The recently released film, “American Sniper,” tries and fails to find the diverging point between the war-life and civilian-life soldier, Chris Kyle. Instead, the storyline hangs on Kyle’s exploits, wasting no time in constantly reminding its audience that he is the most lethal sniper in U.S. history.
Kyle, played by Bradley Cooper, is placed atop a pedestal as an invincible soldier, renowned for his astronomically high and unprecedented number of kills. As the story progresses past his strangely violent father, his cheating girlfriend and moves into his TV-bred fear for his country, Kyle enlists and is torn down into a killing machine rather than built up as a man. As his notoriety grows, he comes off disillusioned by his situation, putting his platoon in jeopardy by abandoning his post in order to work the ground for his own personal hunger of protecting his fellow man, the end result causing more trouble than it prevents.
As “American Sniper” tries to properly depict the war as seen by Kyle, the film neglects to accurately represent the Iraqi people. Kyle’s perspective of war is based on a narrow point of view of the people he fights against.
Films like “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty” succeed where “American Sniper” fails in presenting both soldiers and terrorists on even ground without a good guy vs. bad guy complex.
Rather than question the audience’s perception of the Iraqis, the film chooses to feed into the fearful “Muslim terrorist” stereotype by only showing Iraqis who are “savages.” This negligible filmmaking only feeds into the racist bias against those from the Middle East that is becoming too common in this country.
Equally irresponsible of the film is the nonchalant way in which it handles the war’s effect on its protagonist. “American Sniper” hinges on the after-effect of the war as its main purpose, but barely explores it.
There are moments, like the soldier who thanks Kyle for saving his life in front of Kyle’s son, that truly hit to the core of what the film is trying to convey. Yet moments like that are so far and few in between, they become washed out by the sequences that take place in Iraq.
Looking beyond the film’s narrow vision, it is clear to see how the men and women involved in Iraq can come back distraught in a post-9/11, Patriot-Act America.
They were pawns in a chess game ruled by politics, and it is disparaging to see their lives laid out for the wrong fights, like the war in Iraq.
This self-proclaimed war film does very little to truly highlight the soldier’s struggle, and when it tries to do so, it presents itself as just a hiccup in Kyle’s ladder to his “deadliest sniper in US Military” label, thus negating his struggle almost entirely.
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