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In reply to the discussion: Things NOT to say when seeing "American Sniper" [View all]Ford_Prefect
(7,822 posts)The reviewer below got it best IMHO.
http://www.examiner.com/review/american-sniper-review-destroying-the-hand-that-feeds
What you do once you are in a firefight has no relation what got you into it. They never asked why the war began or why so many people were dying in it. They put on their uniforms and went to kill the "ragheads".
It was the same in Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, the same in Afghanistan. Is still the same in all the as yet un-named locations in Africa we are not allowed to know of or publish about.
The movie never asks how the war began nor invites you to consider that it did not need to happen in the first place. It doesn't dare ask why all those soldiers had to do the awful things that gave them terrible dreams. It only presents the war as a given, one of life's nightmares to be survived, ignoring the documented reality of Neo-Con plotting and a president's joyful duplicity.
IMHO it is one more step in the right wing deification of the warrior: a long-suffering grunt who nobly dies or keeps his buddies from dying in the process and equally noble, if terrible, and inevitable war. ***edit: I think the right wing is taking this film and using it to deify the war and those who fought in it. I don't get that from the director or the film itself. However it is easy to see how those who want it to be about the "heroic warrior" can get there.