Universal Jarhead – HD-DVD
Jake Gyllenhaal (“The Day After Tomorrow,” “Moonlight Mile”), Jamie Foxx (“Ray,”"Collateral”) and Peter Sarsgaard (“Kinsey,” “Boys Don’t Cry”) star in Universal Pictures’ “Jarhead,” the adaptation of Marine Anthony Swofford’s bracing memoir that took readers into his disorienting firsthand experience in the Gulf War. “Jarhead” (the self-imposed moniker of the Marines) follows “Swoff” (Gyllenhaal), a third-generation enlistee,from a sobering stint in boot camp to active duty, sporting a sniper’s rifle and a hundred-pound truck on his back through Middle East deserts with no cover from intolerable heat or from Iraqi soldiers, always potentially just over the next horizon.Swoff and his fellow Marines sustain themselves with sardonic humanity and wicked comedy on blazingdesert fields in a country they don’t understand against an enemy they can’t see for a cause they don’t fully fathom. Foxx portrays Sergeant Sykes, aMarine lifer who heads up SW’s scout/sniper platoon, while Sarsgaard is Swoff’s friend and mentor, Troy, a die-hard member of STA-their elite Marine Unit. An irreverent and true account of a war thatwas antiseptically packaged a decade ago, “Jarhead” is lace with dark wit, honest inquisition and episodes that are at once surreal and poignant, tragic and absurd. Based on Anthony Swofford’s excellent memoir about his experiences as a Marine Sniper in Gulf War I, Jarhead is a war movie in which the waiting is a far greater factor upon the characters than the war itself, and the build up to combat is more drama than what combat is depicted. To some viewers hoping for typical movie action, this will seem like a cruel joke. But it’s not. It’s just the story as it was written, and if you liked the book, you will probably like the movie. If you didn’t, then the movie won’t change your mind.
The movie follows the trajectory of Swofford (played with thoughtful intensity by Jake Gyllenhaal) from wayward Marine recruit (he joined because he “got lost on the way to college”) to skilled Marine sniper, and on into the desert in preparation for the attack on Iraq. No-nonsense, Marine-for-life Staff Sgt. Sykes (Jamie Foxx), the man who recruited Swofford and his spotter Troy (Peter Sarsgaard) into the sniper team, leads them in training, and in waiting where their lives are dominated by endless tension, pointless exercises in absurdity (like playing football in the scorching heat of the desert in their gas masks so it will look better for the media’s TV cameras), more training, and constant anticipation of the moment to come when they’ll finally get to kill. When the war does come, it moves too fast for Swofford’s sniper team, and the one chance they get at a kill–to do the one thing they’ve trained so hard and waited so long for–eludes them, leaving them to wonder what was the point of all they had endured.
As directed by Sam Mendes (American Beauty), the movie remains very loyal to the language and vision of the book, but it doesn’t entirely work as the film needs something more than a literal translation to bring out its full potential. Mendes’s stark and, at times, apocalyptic visuals add a lot and strike the right tone: wide shots of inky-black oil raining down on the vast, empty desert from flaming oil wells contrasted with close-ups of crude-soaked faces struggling through the mire vividly bring to life the meaning of the tagline “welcome to the suck.” But much of the second half of the movie will probably leave some viewers feeling disappointed in the cinematic experience, while others might appreciate its microcosmic depiction of modern chaos and aimlessness. Jarhead is one of those examples where the book is better than the movie, but not for lack of trying. –Dan Vancini
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December 21, 2010
#1
One Jarhead’s perspective..,
I’m a little confused that there’s so many user reviews complaining that Jarhead is ‘a war movie without any war.’ Well.. based on my own experiences as a Marine in our most recent trip to the sandbox, I’d say war without war sounds true to life. Jarhead isn’t showing you what you’d like for Marines and servicemen to be; it’s showing you what we ARE like. Yes, we’re crude, vulgar, irreverent, and largely morally ambivelant. Mostly though, we’re bored. 99.9% of war is waiting. Waiting for to go on patrol, waiting for patrol to be over, waiting to go on or off of guard duty, waiting to sleep, to wake up, to eat, to piss, to finally go home. That’s how it was for my dad in Vietnam, for my cousins in the Gulf War, and for myself in Iraq last year. To some degree, that’s how it’s been for everyone, in every war. To quote this film, “Every war is different, every war is the same.”
If you’ve been in the military, and especially if you’ve been deployed, this should all be sounding pretty familiar. If not, fine. I’d just ask that you consider what it is that would make you dislike this movie. Is it that you don’t like the characters as they are portrayed? Or is it that you don’t like the conflict between your preconceived notion of what a Marine ‘should’ be and what you’re being shown?
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|December 21, 2010
#2
Underrated and Underappreciated – Welcome to the suck.,
Anticipation was high for Jarhead, the cinematic adaptation of Anthony Swifford’s book of the same name about his experiences as a U.S. foot soldier in the first Persian Gulf War. The reaction to the movie was underwhelming to say the least as critics savaged it and audiences stayed away. Something was definitely in the air as the film also failed to pick up any nominations or awards at any of the important ceremonies (Golden Globes, Oscars, et al). Was the film really that bad or had it just been marketed wrong? Or, was it simply the victim of our current political climate?
Jarhead is a film filled with striking images captured wonderfully by director of photography Roger Deakins. For example, Swofford and his platoon come across oil wells burning out of control, oil raining down on them. At night, they continue to burn providing the only light, and coupled with downpour of oil, looks like some kind of nightmarish vision of hell.
Critics complained that nothing happened in the movie but wasn’t that the point? The first Gulf War was typified by highly trained soldiers ready to kill who, for the most part, did nothing because it was predominantly a conflict fought in the air by extensive bombing that ended the war as quickly as it did. Jarhead encapsulates this notion well in a scene where Swoff and Troy are ordered to sniper two high ranking Iraqi officers and at the penultimate moment when they are given the go-ahead to kill they are ordered to stand down so that an air strike can come in and literally steal their thunder. This scene pretty much sums up the experience for a lot of soldiers over there.
Sure, there are the unavoidable comparisons to the boot camp sequences in Full Metal Jacket to the ones in Jarhead but so what? No film lives in a vacuum and those scenes are only a small part of the movie and it soon settles into its own rhythm. The film that Jarhead most lives under the shadow of is Three Kings with its mixture of biting satire and horrific imagery of the madness of war, except that Jarhead ends where Three Kings begins. This is a film about humanity (or, rather the loss of it) and not an epic battle of good vs. evil that perhaps people were expecting. Jarhead is purposely anti-climatic. We won the war but what did we do to win it and why? And more importantly, what were we doing there? By that extension, we should also be asking the same questions about its sequel – one that we are still fighting and paying for.
“Swoff’s Fantasies” feature four deleted scenes with optional commentary by director Sam Mendes and editor Walter Murch. This is footage of Swofford’s inner, fantasy life that was shown briefly in the actual movie but more was actually shot (and even more figured in the book).
“News Interviews in Full” features more footage of Swoff and his platoon being interviewed by the media with optional commentary by Mendes and Murch. The director mentions that he let the actors adlib their answers to the pre-arranged questions.
Also included are 11 deleted scenes with optional commentary by Mendes and Murch. Of note is a scene with Sam Rockwell who plays Swoff’s uncle and is in the Marines. Mendes and Murch do an excellent job of explaining why this footage was cut and are candid in what stuff just didn’t work.
There is an audio commentary by Mendes who didn’t want to overthink the camerawork or go for the meticulously staged compositions as he did with his previous movies and instead opted for a looser look with extensive hand-held camerawork. This is a very strong track as he defends his choices and tells all kinds of good anecdotes.
There is another commentary track by screenwriter William Broyles, Jr. and author Anthony Swofford. Broyles served in the Vietnam War and so these two war veterans talk with absolute authority about the authenticity of this movie. It’s great to listen to Broyles and Swofford – two men who’ve been through what we are watching.
On the Collector’s Edition version are included three documentaries.
First up, is the “Jarhead Diaries.” Mendes provides an introduction where he states his distaste of electronic press kits (finally!) and so he had a documentary crew film more peripheral stuff and gave the actors their own cameras to shoot whatever they wanted. The actors are refreshingly candid about their feelings making this movie as they are going through the actual experience.
“Semper Fi” takes a look at four Marines who came home from the First Gulf War and from the current one. Anthony Swofford interviews these guys and has them talk about what their experiences were like over there and what their life is like now. Because he is also a veteran, he is able to get them to open up a bit. These are pretty sobering accounts as we listen to how hard it is for them to just turn off their combat training once they come back home…
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|December 21, 2010
#3
A Day In The Life of,
I’m a retired Sergeant First Class from the U.S. Army. I didn’t get a chance to see the movie at the theater but I bought the DVD yesterday. Personally I thought it was a great movie. There was a great deal of reality to it. Soldiers, Sailors, Airman or Marine, it matters not. You have some that act totally ignorant in certain situations to help cope with stress while others just deal better with it. I’ve seen it in many forms over my 21 years of Active Duty. I don’t think it shed a bad light on the USMC, because these troops didn’t act much differently then some of the Vietnam troops did. If you’re a warmonger and want to see a lot of action this is not the movie for you, but if you are interested in the day to day or A Day In The Life of kind of movie that shows how a person or typically a servicemember grows this is the one for you. The language is what it used to be like in the Army until they started changing the regulations. The movie took me back to my Army days. I loved it!
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