"It's over man! And we'll never have to come back to this s***hole again!!

Rating: 10/10 (25 February 2020)

Man is this film good. It's both a great black comedy and a startling portrait of American machismo gone wrong in a war that was never fought. The great Bill Hicks once said this about the Gulf War. "There never was a war. A war is when TWO armies are fighting." See this was a new kind of war. This new style of war didn't need soldiers. Fire simply rained down from the sky and the enemies were vanquished. And so too were the conquerors, as the saying goes. The boys in this film, and boys they are, succumb to a morbid fascination with death and killing before they've ever really seen it or done it. They all want to get that first kill. That one perfect shot. They bake in the heat and sand and oil and smoke. They come out of it different people. Tortured by the slow, boring, unending routine of this modern war, needing that kill to truly be what they think is a real man perhaps, losing their identities and breaking down. Doing things most of us would never even think of considering. War breaks down man. What does it leave behind? Who do we become when the abyss stares back?