Blood letters

Rating: Null/10 (26 March 2015)

The cinematic craft here is uninteresting with nothing really to recommend it. I put that aside. This is woeful stuff indeed for other reasons.
What irks most is the tremendous sense of complacency. You'll see this in how it starts. A cowboy who never had the slightest interest in the larger world before TV footage of the US embassy bombings interrupted his beer drinking session one night, suddenly awakened by a sense of purpose. From his end, someone half the world away woke up and decided to bully America for no reason.
The film takes care to make the whole thing, repeated tours in Iraq, about the dogged effort to apprehend a hight-ranking al-Qaeda man. It's something the viewer can substitute as a reason for leveling a country if he absolutely must have one, tied to 9/11. No mention at all of the bugaboo with WMD or Sadam anymore, it has been purged away.
But of course that's all something someone like him might truly believe. Here's the tricky bit. The protagonist never questions anything about his mission but how come Eastwood doesn't? Oh there is some moral pause in all this like when he watches through the sniper's lens at a child trying to pick up a RPG, wishing he just drops it. There is some indignation during the funeral over how long this crusade must go on. We do see returning veterans shattered by horrors. But how come the worry is only about what our people have to suffer in service to country, never why?
The ending crystallizes this ignorantly narrow focus in a larger way.
The American hero has kind psychiatric help waiting for him, he gets to heal in a spacious house with his family. He gets a long funeral procession with flags waved along the streets. A movie about him. It reminds me of watching an NBA pregame last year where US army veterans were paid respect by the whole arena; going beyond political right and wrong, I was amazed truly by all this structure in place to receive them. Iraqi lives on the other hand are truly wretched, nameless, "terrorists" on their own country when seen through the lens of the foreign sharpshooter there to liberate, Iraqi structure reduced to the stone age.
Oh I don't subscribe to the notion that people in the area are happy to lead peaceful and tolerant lives if we only just stop invading. Collective soul in the area has been shaped by forces that divide deeper than anything that happened 50 or 100 years ago; Iraq being a fairly recent adoption that stands on what used to be the border that rival Muslim empires ravaged for centuries. It might have stone aged itself like Syria these days and Lebanon prior without any other help. But I would rather lament this and the ravaged soul and plight of the area before that of the American hero who made it back.