Movie american sniper, page-40

American Sniper: an old-fashioned western in military uniform





At some point this weekend, a small but important record will be broken. Since its release in the US two weeks ago, Clint Eastwood’s new film, American Sniper, has made a little over $209m. Between now and Sunday night, it will (if you ignore inflation) almost certainly become the highest grossing war movie ever, outstripping the $216m of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. This was nothing that anyone saw coming. There was no turbo-charged marketing campaign. Its leading man, Bradley Cooper, is a star – but stars don’t guarantee box office any more.

American Sniper to be highest-earning war movie ever, but Mortdecai dead in the water


Yet these are the numbers of the superhero franchise, the be-caped summer blockbuster. (At a comparable stage, last year’s best picture winner at the Oscars, 12 Years A Slave, had made $24m.) Just as significantly, in its second week on release, Eastwood’s filmbarely dipped in popularity, the sign of a collective nerve not just being struck but quivering into the body politic. The response has been mayhem. American Sniper is that kind of film, based on the autobiography of late navy Seal Chris Kyle, the most lethal sniper in US military history, who amassed a “kill count” in Iraq of between 160 and 255. The exact figure is unknowable. So is a lot else in a film whose intense patriotism has caused all manner of baffled commentary, rekindled furies about the Iraq war, and reportedly inspired threats against Muslims.

Chris Kyle in 2012. Photograph: Paul Moseley/AP
In Hollywood, green lights will now greet a wave of war movies, the film business waking up to a vast new audience. If $209m is a dizzying number, try this – in the US, there are 2.6 million military veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Put at least some of them in cinemas over the past two weeks and American Sniper’s success seems only logical. Learn that more than half still suffer physical or mental health problems, and describe themselves as feeling disconnected from civilian life, and you get the sense of a sea of people desperate to be seen and understood.

Is American Sniper historically accurate?

Enter Kyle. American Sniper is his story, though different versions of him appear in book and film. Each of them concern a virtuoso gunman. Only in his own words, though, does Kyle remark that while war might not be fun, “I was certainly enjoying it.” On the page, he compares killing two men with a single bullet to a scene from 90s slapstick caper Dumb and Dumber. “I hate the damn savages,” he says of Iraqis. He reads like the braggart younger brother of the noble, haunted man on screen, and a difficult kind of hero.
But something that movies are good at (the kind that make $209m, anyway) is sanding off a story’s awkward edges, making things simple that might not be simple at all. Films veer towards life and death, with minimal complications. And Eastwood is nothing if not a great film-maker.


http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/29/american-sniper-old-fashioned-western