Takes your breath away... but so does a train wreck.

Rating: 4/10 (5 November 2005)

"Jarhead" is further proof that a movie's success or failure ultimately comes down to the worth of the script, and that no matter how much excellent work goes into a picture -- from outstanding performances to fantastic editing to stellar photography -- no amount of skill and craftsmanship can remedy the fundamental flaws in the material.
In many ways, "Jarhead" can be equated to "Heaven's Gate," and Sam Mendes to Michael Cimino: when both directors have great scripts, they can make great movies (which does not make either of them great directors). "The Deer Hunter" was a fantastic film, as was "American Beauty." But when these filmmakers got a little too cocky, they both began churning out inconsequential rubbish, like "Road to Perdition" and "Year of the Dragon" and now "Jarhead."
With all due respect, this film has a lot going for it. Roger Deakins's bleach- bypass desert landscapes (though a little too overexposed for me) are quite impressive, Walter Murch's editing is seamlessly perfect, as always, and Thomas Newman's score -- which I'm sure no one else will mention or notice because it's so perfectly interwoven into the loud, rhythmically dominated soundtrack -- pretty much holds the whole thing together. And the performances -- from Jamie Foxx's no-nonsense staff sergeant to Jake Gyllenhall and Peter Saarsgard's raw marine recruits -- are uniformly excellent -- almost frighteningly naturalistic and often powerful.
That said, a question must be raised: what is the point of this film? To show the frustration of warriors without a war? To enlighten us as to the stark differences between the military and the naive, back-home military expectations? To show the brutality and angst and raw machismo of young, unformed, insecure young men in their twenties worrying about their girlfriends and wives back home while serving in the "Corp"?
Well, fine -- this film does that quite well. But so have a dozen other movies, from "All Quiet on the Western Front" nearly a century ago. to "Platoon" and "Full Metal Jacket" more recently (William Broyles' Jr's script lifts its drill instructor dialogue directly out of "Full Metal Jacket," incidentally.)
And all of these films did so without the loud, tedious barrage of unstable, screaming young men hiding their fears and anxieties and sexual insecurities behind bellowing and hitting and mock homo-erotic behavior that grows tiresome long before the first reel has ended.
So this film is gonna be bigger and badder and better because it's got more"grit" and "realism" than those other war films (many of which are "referenced" here, as we now say)? The more realism and grit the better, is that the point? Then why not focus the lens on a latrine for two and half hours? Why not show the real grit -- Marines taking a dump for twelve reels? Why not show them pissing and crapping and vomiting -- that's real, isn't it?
Come to think of it, Mendes does give provide the audience with some outstanding bathroom activity -- but only five or six or seven or eight or nine times. As in "American Beauty," he never misses a chance to give the audience a real good view of urine, or someone urinating, or someone masturbating, or at least one or two or three or four naked men. Mendes gay? Nah! He's just keepin' it real!
Well, this is a perfect example of what movie-making has devolved to in the second century of motion pictures. No wonder documentaries are so popular now. No wonder "Reality TV" is the big thing. Audiences -- at least young, MTV- raised audiences -- have tired of standard plots, tired of unnecessary, extraneous crap such as stories and characters. What they want is realism -- and very little more.
I've noticed that many ofthe IMDb reviewers have praised this film, mainly for its gritty atmosphere and "real" approach. That's all well and good -- but I can get that in any number of excellent Gulf War documentaries, and better.
Like "Full Metal jacket," "Jarhead was based on a Marine's memoir. Unlike "Full Metal Jacket," the script for "Jarhead" seems to have no ultimate point. In the end the picture gives us nothing new, nothing profound, nothing we haven't seen before and nothing truly disturbing or emotionally involving or thought-provoking (I guess we'll have to dig out the DVDs of "Platoon" or "The Deer Hunter" or "Apocalypse Now" for that.
What this film does give us, though, is a lot of noise and screaming and machismo, a mumbling, badly-enunciated "Full Metal Jacket"-wannabe voice-over narration, and a pointless, confusing, unsatisfying ending. Stanley Kubrick, where are you now that we need you?!?