Not A Very Good Movie

Rating: 6/10 (8 March 2010)

Honestly.
This film the best of 2009?
An Oscar winning effort?
Not to me. I didn't like it.
It didn't engage me. The first job of a movie is to pull in the viewer. Without active participation by the viewer, the movie stays only a set of images----and like a newspaper front page can be thrown away once read. The reason I didn't feel engaged ...? The characters and situations did not seem that credible.
I haven't served in the Mideast wars but it seemed to me that the situations the human was being placed into were unrealistic : in today's war room, I would think Americans relying more on robotics, and then remote detonation of explosives. So I didn't get that part of it.
The characters were not that interesting to me. Maybe they were just not the type I would associate with... I don't know. These characters just didn't speak to me. The obligatory male bonding drunken fight scene left me cold. The relationship between the protagonist and the native child was a little better . . . at least I had a sense that he cared about the little boy, (or by Freudian displacement his own inner child), but at least I could identify with his feelings. In the scene when the soldiers go into a very dangerous area at night, ill-equipped, it seemed totally unreasonable. A person would have to be truly stupid to do something like that.... and the characters were not portrayed as that ignorant. So it didn't fly with me.
Really . . . did ANYONE believe that this movie was a better movie than Avatar which it beat for the Academy Award?
You're kidding, right?
The only mark I give this movie is for its portrayal of the Iraq war as distorted and confused violence without a clear sense of ultimate outcome. In that, it succeeded in buying my belief. But not a very good movie. There are far better war movies. This wasn't Oscar material.