The negative reviews just don't get it

Rating: 9/10 (23 February 2018)

Most of the negative reviews on this film seem to hate it simply because it's "too American". Well yes, it's very American, you'll get a lot of that "good ol' land of the free, home of the brave" preachy stuff in this story, but no, it's not "propaganda" trying to make Muslims look evil and Americans look glamorous. If anything, it's simply about the futility of war and the cruelty of it all. The behavior of Americans towards Iraq is not glossed over in the least. We get Marines busting down doors, constant derogatory remarks and comments about Muslims being "savages". All that being said, Chris Kyle hates terrorists, not Muslims, and it's both 9/11 and the deaths of Muslim children he sees that haunt him the most. I'm sorry, but if holding down a little boy and drilling into his skull to torture him in front of his father isn't savage behavior, I don't know what is, and keep in mind that both the little boy and his grieving parents are all Muslims. This film could even be said to be about the underlying flaws of patriotism when the human cost of it is not acknowledged. A grieving lady is seen sobbing and cringing at a soldier's very military, gun-toting funeral service, reading his last letter home to her and wondering if it's really all worth it. Soldiers are shot in the face and killed in the line of duty only to be quickly forgotten. What did it solve? American Sniper breaks down the blindness of American patriotism in a frightened post-9/11 world, and it's impossible not to compare the American and Middle-Eastern children in this film and wonder if the war their parents became involved in will follow them for the rest of their lives. Whether it's a boy throwing a grenade or a boy shooting and killing a deer for "sport".
The film does have good morals in the end as Kyle explains to his young son, "it's a hell of a thing to stop a heartbeat". If there's one lesson to be learned here, it's that if you ever feel like there's a good reason to kill, you'd better pause for just a second and consider first whether or not it will undo what's already been done. For the 160 people Kyle blows away, 3,000 still died in 9/11 and can't be brought back. I was personally four years old when 9/11 happened and the loss of some very good friends really affected my family in a bad way, but honestly when I think of those people working in the World Trade Center, men and women who had families of their own just trying to make a living, if you asked any of them when they were still alive I don't think they'd agree with what happened in Iraq (oddly enough, Al Qaeda wasn't in Iraq, they were elsewhere in the Middle East, but that's another topic). What really drills down to the pointlessness of war in American Sniper is the ending. If you allow yourself to be consumed by this military culture over your family, it'll eat you alive sooner or later, no matter how tough you think you are or how detached from killing and violence you may be.
My only real complaint about this film is that it drags on at times with nothing but gunshots and death. We rarely get a view of Kyle's wife and children to see how they cope with his absence except for brief shots of his wife crying or spying on her returned husband sprawled out on the sofa. Yes it's his story, but I can't help but think that the bigger story here is the legacy that the "War on Terror" will leave behind for future generations, generations who will just have this stuff ingrained into their culture from birth even if they were never alive to witness 9/11 or the Iraq War or the politics and rhetoric that quickly followed in the event of these terrorist attacks. Now we've got ISIS to worry about, and I often wonder if maybe it will just keep going in a chain of brutality until one country knows enough to break it and call some sort of truce.