When Mendes makes a recruitment film for the marines

Rating: 2/10 (28 January 2006)

What would happen if someone made 'Starship Troopers' for real? Jarhead is the fascist recruiting tool that Verhoeven parodied so effective in his most commonly misunderstood work.
Like ST, but with no sense of irony whatsoever, Jarhead is a lazy slop of marine clichés acted out by a bunch of pretty boys straight out of Beverly Hills 90210. The film is a crude cut'n'paste from every war film you've seen in the last 30 years, making no effort whatsoever to hide how much it steals in method from productions like 'Biloxi Blues'. Because the story as shot has no veracity of its own, its 'Gulf war' flavour is an artificial list of iconic standouts taken from articles appearing in US magazines and papers at the time, as with the clumsy and tedious scenes involving commercial airliners moving troops.
The script and dialogue are simply awful. The performances, well they suit the recruiting purpose of the movie fine, in so far as they obviously 'speak' to young naive viewers, as so many reviews here prove.
The film has one one merit, and that is the cinematography. However, even this is one note, fine for 15 mins, tedious and annoying across the whole movie.
Taken as a whole, think MTV music video. Pretty people, pretty pictures, superficial, but with a hook crafted to 'catch' a generation.
As the US prepares for an horrific war in Iran, this is the movie designed to condition a new generation of kids for their role as cannon fodder. Simple minded people could not get the point of Starship Troopers, because it seemed to show that 'war is hell'. Simple minded people do not get the point of Jarhead because it shows that 'war is tedium'. Neither seem designed to recruit people into the armed services. However, the way in which any propaganda works is in how the embedded message REALLY connects with the viewer, regardless of what the viewer thinks at the time.
Jarhead was made for the self-same reason as Stealth. However, it is obvious that Jarhead does its propaganda job a thousand times better.
For those of you that really want to know about the nature of marine snipers, may I invite you to use the internet to learn about the events in places like Fallujah. Ambulance drivers shot in the face, women gunned down as they left their besieged homes in search for water, and whole families sniped dead one at a time as they sought to escape from the city. There are 'interesting' stories to be told about US marines, but Sam Mendes is no more likely to film them than Leni Riefenstahl would have shown the true nature of Hitler's regime.