Nicely realistic and fair depictions of a war hero

Rating: 7/10 (11 January 2015)

Chris Kyle is a Navy SEAL sniper deployed in Iraq circa 2003. His main job is assisting house searches as an over-watch sniper. His duty lets him take decisive shots, quickly building his reputation a sniper legend. But those shots face him at split seconds to moral contradictions. Once he shot a child and his mother who carries a grenade toward a convoy. Feeling he hasn't done enough, he joins the ground search himself, finding an old man who talks about The Butcher, the Al Qaeda in Iraq's number two man. But as the soldiers return to the old man's house, The Butcher arrived earlier and teaches the man's family a lesson for talking to the Americans, killing the man. Chris and the soldiers are held back from helping due to The Butcher posted a skilled sniper, Mustafa, who covers his back.
At another recon op in hunting The Butcher, Chris and his fellow SEALS are welcomed to a dinner by the man whose house's second floor is used as the recon post. But Chris finds that the man actually works for Zarqawi. The SEALS manage to neutralize the threats but The Butcher flees the scene. Back home after his third tour of duty, Chris gets more and more distanced with civilian life and fights with his wife about his will to redeploy. At his fourth tour, his team finds that engineers in Sadr City are being killed one by one from as far as 1000 yards away, strengthening the guess that it's Mustafa. The team inserts to position at a rooftop despite an imminent sandstorm. Another soldier gets sniped and Chris says he sees Mustafa. His fellows finds it hard to believe him as Mustafa may be at about 2000 yards away.
Furthermore, the base tells them that the ground surrounding their location is now crawling with threats, a shot from them will bring them under attack. Chris strengthen his nerves and takes the shot. He succeeds in killing Mustafa, but threats soon hail shots at them as their backup still hasn't arrive. The SEALS made it out as the backup arrives in the sandstorm but Chris gets shot and retires after that. Back home, Chris struggles to connect with daily life. But a doctor introduces him to the veterans group to which he then provide support work, sometimes taking the men to shooting range and teaching them to shoot sniper rifles. But Chris loses his life when he tries to help a disturbed young marine.
The story nicely encompass fair depictions of how war can affect harshly to someone even as skilled as Chris Kyle. We get to see that even a war hero, a sniper legend, gets stuck with the war syndrome. The movie serves the harsh truth of the threats the military face, and the severely blurred line between doing what's right and doing it right while countering those threats. And those threats are depicted fairly real, that an enemy deeming suicide bomb is just a standard plan of attack may even take notch even further by ordering women and children in on an assault with a grenade on their hands.
The action feels nicely authentic. In general Eastwood greatly directs the action so that it doesn't seem hyperbolic, that the action moves fluidly natural. The actors get to act parts like how a body lumps down after being shot in the head, or how a body doesn't really jerk uncontrollably when it's barraged with full auto shots from close range.
As someone experienced I first person shooter games, the sniper shots seemed real enough. Yet for me, there's discrepancy between the shots from the rifle's scope and how Chris uses his scope. The scope footage shows the cross-hairs following potential targets, which means Chris must be panning his rifle significantly far enough to show on when he's shown back peeping at the scope. But when it does go back to him, his posture doesn't really change.
The acting is nice overall. Bradley Cooper again nicely shows he knew that the movie's focus will be almost entirely on his character. He did very well on those close up shots, portraying the right emotions and expression variations between the tour time and the home time. Sienna Miller completes the movie with her performance n the needed critical role of the spouse.
For me American Sniper (2014) deserves a 7 out of 10 score and a recommendation to go and see in the cinemas. It's a good entertainment that shows nice realistic military gun fights and is completed with the fair depiction of a post tour effect on a soldier.