Very well done

Rating: 8/10 (24 November 2005)

Sam Mendes has done exactly what needed to be done with Anthony Swofford's personal memoir of the first Bush gulf war - he brought it to life honestly, with minimal embellishment, and with captivating artistry. A second viewing will be required for me, and I suspect that my rating will improve after I see it again. Mendes directing, and the straightforward script, combine to make what could have been a trial by tedium, brisk and entertaining.
Swoff is a fairly typical young man - naive yet not idealistic, self-centered and myopic but not really closed to the world around him, sometimes arrogant yet not really rebellious - who has enlisted to serve in the first Bush gulf war. He's not really gung-ho about anything in particular, but nevertheless, manages to experience both the war and his preparation for it as a series of disappointments, protracted fits of boredom, and an exercise in humiliation and futility. The film is presented apolitically, and politics will only interfere with your experience of the film to the extent that you let it. As somebody who supported the first Bush gulf war, though not our stated reasons for launching it, I very much appreciated the insider view this film offered.
The personalities in it are so vivid (some cross the boundary into stereotypes and never come back) that the film sometimes loses focus on its subject in order to comment upon individual people within the protagonist's very narrow field of view. Given the myopic character of the work from which this is derived, and the intense subjectivity of the approach, this turns out to be a strength of the film - making it truly original for its genre. this is no "war film" as the genre stands today, but rather, one of the first of what will likely be a postmodern redefinition of the war film genre - focusing reflexively on the practice of warfare as experienced by those who were actually there. An older, less polished, film that I particularly liked, but which seems to have been largely ignored comes to mind - "Heroes".
Jake Gyllenhaal plays Swoff well, but for me, the supporting cast really made this film. I see this cast as an ensemble. To a man, the performances were flat-out exceptional. As with most of Mendes' work, the film is also visually stunning.
Recommended, strongly.