disappointing propaganda movie

Rating: 4/10 (19 May 2015)

"American Sniper" reminds me of "Team America" - both are over the top ridiculous, only while the latter was bitingly sarcastic, this one is dead serious. One has a song saying "Team America, f**k yeah!", while the other has lines like: "Shall we go kill some bad guys? F**k yes!". I'm pretty sure skimming through the scripts can yield more parallels. This is how bas AS is.
I don't think this exercise in hagiography does the memory of Chris Kyle any service. The movie seems to care only about glorifying "killing bad guys", without any attempt at looking at the elusive bigger picture - why do the "bad guys" fight us? What's the war about? Do the means justify the greater goal, which... I'm not too sure what that was? I can only think of "Trial at Nuremberg" as an example of how American movies used to be, and that one was about the aftermath of a war the US had actually won (or helped win). That one was more introspective, wondering whether the US had the right to judge the defeated, asking whether the Germans shouldn't be allowed a little dignity, after all. No such questions in Clint Eastwood's movie; one character has some doubts, only to be quickly dismissed by Bradley Cooper's character in 2 sentences. Yay - just like old Soviet propaganda movies.