Good, clean anti-war movie

Rating: 8/10 (10 June 2017)

I've been abstinent from IMDb for quite some time but just watching War machine and considering the bad ratings it has gotten so far gave me an impulse to write a review.
First off: This is a good movie. At the beginning of the movie Brad Pitt overdoes it a bit in his caricature of General McMahon and I was quite frankly expecting a few laughs in the following. But this film is not a full-fledged comedy and I don't think it was meant to be.
In the course of this film I got used to Brad Pitt's seemingly overdone gestures and postures and took them as genuine features of the General portrayed.
There are a few scenes which I really liked about the movie: The best moment to me was when Tilda Swinton in the role of a German journalist reveals by intelligent interrogation that General McMahon lives in his own world where battles and wars are either lost or won. She makes it clear to him and the rest of the world that wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan can never be won because they do not fit the pattern of wars such as WWII or WWI, with a clear cut enemy and clear front lines. She (Tilda Swinton aka German journalist) has understood what the Generals and the political leaders of the coalition forces have failed to grasp or do not want to grasp. She questions the general's sense of self and it seems that she is the first person that gets through to the General and incites him to question himself.
The one and only battle scene of the film was, in my humble opinion, done very well, too. You see a group of American soldiers in a deserted, strategically totally unimportant area fighting a battle against three Taliban snipers. In the fight, a young soldier manages to kill the snipers by an act of bravery but kills an innocent boy as well. The supposed hero turns home from battle as a broken man. That's in a nutshell what war does to any young man.
When Brad Pitt aka General McMahon flies in to tell the Afghan people what it is they are trying to do and wants to draw a bigger picture they all just kindly ask him to leave. He tries again to make them understand, but to no avail. Even the metaphorically used expression 'If you want to make an omelette you have to break some eggs' surprisingly fails to win the hearts and minds of the Afhhan people.
The only reason I can think of why this film is unsuccessful is because it is very critical of the American foreign policy/ military and Americans (that is my contention) in general don't like it if their army is ridiculed. Another reason might be that people expected battles scenes but as I've said, there is only one.
Bottom line: If you want to understand how futile the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are, go see this film