It was a Valentine’s Day outing with my husband. Yeah, not a standard Date Night movie, but it had been on the agenda in a “gotta see what all the fuss is about” sort of way. (Though we will not be seeing “50 Shades” based on that approach.)
What did I think? I didn’t think that the move romanticized Chris Kyle; although he repeated that his goal was solely to protect his country, the movie made it clear that his repeated returns to battle were, yes, about patriotism, but also about more than that — about finishing what he started, and feeling bound together with his comrades, and just not being able to let go of the mission. And was he bloodthirsty? Not particularly — it was a war, after all. Was he insufficiently sensitive to the local Iraqis? That’s a foolish standard, to expect soldiers to be “sensitive” to their enemies, who are, after all, attempting to kill them.
There were three things I didn’t like much about the movie: first, the timeline didn’t seem to make sense. He enlists before 9-11, and, based on the movie’s storytelling, appears to be in Iraq nearly continuously, with short return stays, until he finally leaves the service; at which point, during a counseling session, a psychologist says, “you were in-country for 1,000 days,” at which point I felt a bit disoriented. (Wikipedia says he was in the service from 1999 to 2009.) So clearly the movie is omitting lots of time that he spent in the U.S., presumably on-base somewhere, in order to make his wife’s pleas that he stay with her more heart-rending.
The movie then shows a few scenes of his spending time with disabled vets, and suddenly it’s 2013 and his wife is saying, paraphrased, “I’m so glad you’re recovered from your PTSD” — which is my second gripe, that there was so little time given over to this part of the story. Maybe there wasn’t enough source material here — maybe his “PTSD recovery” really didn’t consist of more than time, and the visits with vets that the movie shows briefly. But it felt too easy.
My third gripe? The last battle scene was too much — by then I’d had pretty much all I could take of shooting and death.
Side note: the commercials before the movie were clearly based on the expectation that the audience consisted of adult couples — including one by Trojan. And the trailers? Well, those had nothing to do with Valentine’s Day, and everything to do with the fact that there are, apparently, a large number of rather violent movies coming out, or already in the theater.
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