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Jarhead (2005)
Rate:
9
Viewed:
2/25
2/25:
Jarhead or...Retard?
The United States military has been a joke since the Vietnam War. It kills people in the interest of businesses.
There hasn't been a war that made sense since WWII. But the United States doesn't care about all of that,
preferring to spend almost one trillion dollars annually on defense. No other country comes close, and it'll
take the next ten or so ranked countries combined to match this amount.
At first, I didn't like Jarhead because of the obscene, brainwashed, gung-ho characters and thought it
would be a repeat of Full Metal Jacket. Yet the show, although extreme,
got better over time by illustrating the pointlessness of how the military functioned and the catch-22 aspect of
it. I had to look up online whether what I saw was accurate, and many said yes and the others no with a whole lot in
between. No matter what, the author of the book, Anthony Swofford, was so disillusioned by everything that he
stood by his words.
The performances are very good. Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard (whose character actually died in a car
accident which wasn't mentioned at the end), Jamie Foxx, Evan Jones, and Chris Cooper are the standouts
even though I hate all of their characters. Given their deployment in Saudi Arabia, I'm surprised they went through
some of the days in the desert without wearing a shirt or sunglasses. The funniest scene of the film is when a
guy played a VHS tape of The Deer Hunter in front of soldiers and it
switched to his wife being fucked by a random guy as an act of revenge.
All in all, Jarhead has made an embarrassment out of the entire U.S. military.