Jarhead

Join up! Uncle Sam wants you! You’ll have a great time with us, get to do some shooting, kill some non-American bastards, protect your country and three meals a day... Or not? Boredom in the desert or Sam Mendes’ third attempt. And again it’s something completely different from his previous movies. This time he brings us a provocative and raw insight into the life of a young marine during the Gulf War. First he undergoes training and then, keen to fight, he is posted to a war where nothing happens and the action he was dreaming about never comes, and all he does is stand on watch amongst sand dunes, waiting and waiting... And waiting. The movie is more a patchwork of individual scenes (especially the one when the soldiers are watching Apocalypse Now I can’t shake out of my head, like many other scenes too), but despite that, or maybe because of that, the movie is really powerful. And we get good elephant doses of sarcasm and satire. In technical terms it is precise (that’s right, the camerawork is almost unreal; the scene with the horse in the middle of the burning oil fields is the peak of perfection), as is the soundtrack. Every one of the actors is great, as they tend to be in Mendes’ movies. Mendes’ directing is again flawless, inventive and seething with ideas. And Jake “Donnie Darko" Gyllenhaal is a chapter in himself, proving again that he is one of the biggest talents of contemporary transatlantic cinema. This picture of boredom in the middle of a modern military conflict and the impact it leaves on its protagonists is even more interesting and chilling because the movie manages to impart this feeling to the viewer too. (20/02/2006)

Serious perspectives of war as hell on earth abound throughout cinema. It's a bit harder to find lighter funny satires. Yet is it worthwhile to look at war without a drop of sentimentality and still maintain a sarcastic tone about how "war is an asshole" even when it's boring? Sam Mendes has undergone a genre metamorphosis and instead of family crises, he observes the negative effects of combat conflict on individuals without firing a single shot. Right from the introduction to when they are at the military staging area, which in a way paraphrases Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, through the uncompromising pouring of ideology into the brains of the soldiers, when it is necessary to declare to the public forever how important it is to fight for one's country, to the (non)encounter with the enemy itself. In this case they are not the Iraqi troops, but rather one's own frustration from unreasonable boredom and endless waiting. When Swofford thinks of his girlfriend, the viewer is tempted to go and pat him sympathetically on the back; when he cleans latrines as punishment, we prefer to turn away. And when the sky turns black and oil rain starts falling from the sky, everyone has to realize that things can't get any worse. Then memories of encounters with a lone horse or a column of Humvees wandering through the desert come to mind and we want to praise cameraman Roger Deakins. Finally, any Foxx - Gyllenhaal debate tells us that the current generation of actors has its aces. And I'm beginning to think that going to war wasn't the happiest decision I’ve ever made. (15/04/2006)

I’m thrilled. A slightly different, but no less interesting view of military conflict, which goes the way of depicting the feelings and frustrations that must be experienced by guys trained in elite units only to cover the backs of their colleagues deployed directly in the heat of war. We see their eagerness to fight in the scene where they chant and scream with enthusiasm during a screening of the bombing of a Vietnamese village in Coppola's Apocalypse Now, just as I felt first-hand the frustration of one of the characters at not being able to take part in "it". The impressive scene when, with desperation in his eyes, he begs his superior to shoot at least one soldier, has more power and meaning than half an hour of uninterrupted action. When the protagonist vomits among the charred bodies, the more perceptive viewer will shudder. The apocalyptic image with a horse, greasy with oil all over its body, and the burning oil wells glowing into the darkness in the distance, takes on a kind of mystical beauty thanks to the evocative cinematography. Jake Gyllenhaal continues to grow as an actor and delivers a terrific performance (an Oscar nomination would be fitting), with the reliable Jamie Fox backing him up. Not since Russell's Three Kings has there been such a cool war-themed movie. (02/03/2006)

To shoot a film that captures a war fought with remotely controlled missiles and aircraft from the perspective of a soldier who experiences it in a closed community in the middle of an inhospitable desert without the presence of women is very bold and above all challenging. The film lacks action, the risk of danger, and emotions fueled by fear, desperation, hatred, and pain. However, Sam Mendes took the risk and made a film that fairly accurately captures the endless waiting for orders and deployment, so that viewers tuned to the right wavelength would not be disappointed and would have a decent cinematic experience. Mendes is one of the most talented contemporary directors, but it is necessary to emphasize that his work is also characterized by caution, playing it safe, and working through unquestionable creativity primarily with established conventions. It is simply not a new One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which clearly criticized the system and undermined it with new ideas and a different perspective. When Forman was filming Hair at the time, he faced the unwillingness of the American army and criticism for lack of patriotism and anti-American attitudes. Jarhead could easily have been given a million or two from the Pentagon from its budget because, in my opinion, it contains similarly subtly dosed hidden propaganda of "American values" to what is criticized in Michalkov's film, when he mixed admiration for enlightened authoritarianism into his remake of 12. In terms of filmmaking, there is not much to criticize about Mendes. Fans of dynamic action will naturally be disappointed by Jarhead, but for me, it's a solid overall impression of 75%. (05/03/2011)

Visually, it was an extremely beautiful film, plot-wise it wasn't that great. While watching Jarhead, I was reminded of many other (and better) films, from Full Metal Jacket and How I Won the War to The Thin Red Line, The Hill and Black Hawk Down, and the story was again the classic confession of one green brain looking for battle. But fortunately it was also peppered with enough humor (which reminds me of the lack of "comedy" in these genres). However, the film is easily pushed above average by the technical processing. Director Mendes and cinematographer Deakins have a blast in the desert, you can almost feel the heat in the film, and from the oil wells being lit to the end, Jarhead is a feast for the eyes. One shot more breathtaking than the next. (16/12/2012)