The real tragedy of the military is the waste of all that young testosterone....

Rating: Null/10 (5 November 2005)

...Whew, lengthy summary there, but that about sums up my gut reaction to this film. There's a lot in "Jarhead" that may seem mysterious to someone who was never a young male who signed up for one of the branches of armed service, especially with the expectation of going to war shortly. The bulk of this movie takes place between the summer 1990 invasion of Kuwait by Iraq and the following spring when our massed forces simply rolled over the Iraqi trenches, burying thousands of them alive (this rightly isn't depicted in "Jarhead," since it wasn't witnessed by the guy who wrote the book on which the movie is based) before stopping short from ousting Saddam Hussein because Bush Senior and his crew (including Dick Cheney) correctly believed that it would lead to chaos and a Vietnam-like morass for us. (This of course didn't stop Bush Junior and his crew (including Dick Cheney) from getting us into exactly that situation twelve years later, but that's been dealt with before....) In a nutshell, "Jarhead" depicts all these young gungho Marines going nuts because they're not permitted to do their job, i.e. engage and destroy the enemy through fire and maneuver, or more bluntly: kill people and break things. An "ordinary person" may think "So what's the problem? They're alive and well," etc. To the extent "Jarhead" has a flaw, it's that it simply relies on the realities about which the real Mr. Swofford wrote. If the viewer doesn't "buy into" that, then the movie won't succeed for him/her.
One of the many things I liked about "Jarhead" is that it's NOT about politics, at all. When one Marine character tries to bring that up ("We're here fighting for the oil companies," etc.) another character cuts that short: "We're here now. Everything else is bull---t." Both are correct. The character whose line that is, played by the intelligence-exuding Peter Sarsgaard, is if anything the most intelligent of the group, also the most cynical and the most gungho; in a cruel twist of fate, he's the only one of them other than the sergeant who wants to be a Marine for life, but they won't let him stay because he lied about having a criminal record.
If director Sam Mendes has succeeded at his task, then by the time you get to what I regard as the climax, with the two snipers finally ready to consummate their mission by shooting the Iraqi officer in the tower, you'll fully understand and embrace their reaction when that gets taken away from them. If your reaction is similar to that of the asshole Major, then I guess Mendes has failed, and maybe should have just presented it as a straight documentary.
Some random plug points: Sarsgaard stands out in an exemplary cast; his part is not so large as to preclude a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for him. The photography admirably transforms southern California and Mexico into Kuwait and Iraq, aided of course by the inevitable computer graphics. The scene with the Marines encountering the ghost convoy with the burned and blackened corpses is suitably eerie, although I wish movies would quit showing people vomiting on-screen because they can't get the projectile nature of it right; it looks like people spitting something out, not something being forced out. (Whenever I've had to throw up, I felt like the poor sap in "Alien," only not through the chest of course.) Nice to see a war movie occasionally acknowledge "friendly fire," such as that which took the life of former NFL star Pat Tillman. Near the end I liked the line "We won't have to come back here..." letting the sad irony just briefly resonate. The scene with the jar heads getting engrossed in "Apocalypse Now" was just brilliant (at Fort Benning I knew a guy who had the dialog from that one memorized). Minor quibble: the scene with Swofford threatening the other Marine at gunpoint in the tent was the only one that felt somewhat "staged," where Jake Gyllenhaal seemed to be "acting." Like Matthew Modine in "Full Metal Jacket," he has to carry the movie playing a character who seems not always believable even though (or maybe because) it's based on a real person. Somehow Mr. Gyllenhall's Swofford is always either too much of a "wise guy" or not enough of one....
That brings me to my semi-final point: yeah, I know "Jarhead" reminds people of other movies, especially "Full Metal Jacket," especially early on. That couldn't have been avoided anyway, but it fits with the motif of these young guys living in the shadow of Vietnam. ("That's Vietnam music," Gyllenhaal laments at one point, "can't we have our own music?") If anything I credit Mendes with making the Vietnam analogy less overbearing than I probably would have done myself. (The government did learn one thing from 'Nam though, nowadays they don't let us actually see our dead or wounded if they can prevent it.) One final quibble: "Jarhead" makes no reference to "Gulf War Syndrome" which (unsurprisingly) the Veterans Administration has been trying to downplay as much as possible, but maybe that wasn't in Mr. Swofford's book which I confess I haven't read.
I have an unhappy hunch that "Jarhead" may suffer the same fate as "Blackhawk Down," another painfully meticulous rendition of an episode in our military history that we just seem to want to forget. But those two will, I believe, be in the pantheon of (anti)war movies some day, along with "Paths of Glory" and "A Midnight Clear" and a few others. Maybe the best scene in "Jarhead" is with the graying Vietnam veteran on the bus with the young studs staring at him politely but quizzically. "All wars are different; all wars are the same," kids shooting their youthful vim/vigor wad at the behest of the "stupid white men"....