"We are still in the Desert..."

Rating: 8/10 (8 November 2005)

It's that haunting final line of "Jarhead" that pierces the viewer most. Sam Mendes' superb adaptation of Anthony Swofford's novel is the best and most artistically astute "grunts-eye-view" of modern warfare since Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket." Mendes successfully does for Desert Storm what Kubrick did for Vietnam.
We are provided here with a full array of the varied types of men (the bored, those looking for a way out, the slightly crazy thrilled at the chance to blow things up and kill people, those with some vague sense of the honor serving one's country has brought to generations past) who go to war, and how in the end "All wars are different, but all wars are the same." Expertly displayed here is the utter futility of our modern wars in the Middle East. Most of the film's runtime is dedicated to the boredom the Marines experience as they train endlessly in the desert to fight some distant enemy that never really shows his face. The war is quick and the men are sent home without ever firing a shot at the enemy, yet, as it is so beautifully noted, "We are still in the desert" and men and women are still being sent to fight a war for what....oil? Oh, and the oil is beautifully on display here, lit up at night across the desert sands and raining down on soldiers and corpses alike with wanton abandon. Cinematographer Roger Deakins takes over nicely for the late Conrad Hall as Sam Mendes cohort in capturing jaw-droppingly beautiful cinematic compositions and painting them on the big screen.
Some have complained that "Jarhead" lacks an emotional core, but I dare you to find more emotional scenes than Jake Gyllenhaal coughing up a mountain of sand in a frenzied nightmare, Peter Sarsgaard cowering in the tower in the midst of a psychological breakdown after not being allowed to take the sniper shot he has been training endlessly to take, or one of the final scenes where a nameless Vietnam vet hops aboard the bus as the Marines come home to cheers and a parade in a sad and haunted attempt to experience the hero's welcome he never received for his war.
All war movies are not the same, and this one is a bitter cut above the rest.