Unbelievable piece of military propaganda

Rating: 1/10 (20 November 2000)

I decided to see this movie hoping that it would be like A Few Good Men, a good story about duty and honor. The trailers tricked me - I thought that Jackson was a scapegoat for some mission gone bad and that he had to fight some government agent/superior officer to demonstrate that he was innocent. Instead - surprise! - he is a lying murdering b****rd who is quite surprised when he is faced with 83 charges of homicide. He doesn't feel guilt or remorse when his soldiers massacre children and women, but we are supposed to like him because he cries every time he sees an American flag. This movie teaches us that it's right, moral and even honorable to kill unarmed prisoners; that you can break or ignore the rules of engagement so long as you know them by heart; that a Yemenite life is worth 0,036 times an American life; that it's normal to kill women, old men and children when you have several other options available (warning shots or retreat). The delicate subject of child-soldiers is treated with alarming lightness, civilian casualties are brushed away as irrelevant. Even more worrying, I read the comments of the other users and most of them considered Jackson innocent ("Hey, that small girl was SHOOTING him! She deserved to die!"). I advise those people to go out and buy some moral sense. I didn't walk out of the theater only because I hoped to see Jackson convicted - or at least that he understood what he had done. There actually was a surprise in the end - something so unbelievable that I was disgusted. It's incredible that this piece of trash was distributed outside the United States.