Heroic and Heart-wrenching. A story of not just the war of bombs and bullets, but also of the mind.

Rating: 8/10 (22 February 2015)

Well I'm no movie reviewer, but these are my thoughts on American Sniper.
If you're wanting to watch a movie about snipers you're coming to watch the wrong film. American Sniper isn't a "Saving Private Ryan" romp of violence and carnage, though there are the scenes depicting events which took place over the various tours of Iraq that Chris Kyle undertook as part of a US Navy SEAL team, and I mention team for a reason. Bradley Cooper's performance is impressive, and has clearly done a lot of work for the role. I think Sienna Miller (portraying the wife Taya Kyle) was nuanced and sensitive, and though her time on screen is limited it is memorable and touching.
I've seen and read many reviews that describe this film as a glorification of US military, how it creates the polarisation and massive over-simplification of the conflicts that the US (and her Allies) have gotten into in the Middle East (Iraq, Afghanistan etc) and that it establishes the US as the good guys with the natives as the bad guys, how American Sniper is nothing more than shoddy film making that acts as merely a recruitment tool for the US Armed Forces. My overwhelming feeling is that those who reviewed the movie as such most likely have never served in their nation's armed forces, and fail to grasp the essence of what Clint Eastwood is putting before us.
American Sniper isn't about the glory of war, far from it. Using the lens of this one man's life of service to his nation, Clint Eastwood bares the soul of every serviceman and woman who is willing to make that sacrifice for their country, their people, their way of life. That these high ideals might initially motivate recruitment, but that through the fires of selection and training, and the forge of operational deployments, brotherhoods are created that cannot be understood fully by the average person back home.
Chris Kyle, like so many other servicemen and women in the US and British forces, was a Protector. He cared for every battle-brother out there (though he met a fraction who would have actually deployed), and that desire to protect took him into the hell that is war so that others might live, to take the fight to the enemy to prevent it from festering like a cancer and spreading to his own shores, a sentiment shared by many that I know. John 15:13 "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."
To those that saw that movie as some sort of tool for glorification and recruitment, I would say that their left-wing liberal agenda had their minds made up before they went to watch that film. The emotional trauma that Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) goes through is brutal. It quite literally threatens to tear his family apart, it robs him of his humanity, it brutalises his soul. This movie doesn't shy away from letting us see the naked violence that simmers just below the surface as he embraces his wife or kids, of the darkness behind the eyes of a man living in a peaceful world, having just returned from hell.
I saw American Sniper as the story not of some super-man, but rather of a real man with real depth and vulnerability, who takes on that role of Protector and swallows the poisonous violence, horror, and despair that is war, all so that others will not have to be exposed. There is a huge societal threat from mental health illness in our current and former service personnel and I think it is marvellous that a mainstream Hollywood film is shining the light into this dark attic of our collective mind.
Are the characters in the movie the most complex and evolved? No. Would it have been nice to see more character development? Yes. To do all that we would have needed a series of films as this story spans many years, and I don't believe that this would enhance what Clint Eastwood is offering to us.
It's worth seeing, but go in looking for the human story, not one of wild special effects and teeth rattling explosions. Finally let me leave you with a quote that is close to my heart personally, and that sums up my feeling of American Sniper the film:
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. John Stuart Mill (1806 - 1873)