^faldo^
Member
After playing some preview code for Joint Task Force, I was in the mood for a good modern combat war film. But I've seen a lot of them, and I can be a picky bastard.
The winning package had to be gritty, like Full Metal Jacket. It shouldn't take itself too seriously, see also Three Kings. Topical subject material, a-la Apocalypse Now, wouldn't go astray. The blend should remind me of a war film, but still surprise me with originality.
Imagine having your favorite guitar stolen years ago. The emotion has now well and truly subsided. You stumble into a pawn shop, see it on the rack, and had no choice but to buy it back. What's worse is that not only do you have to buy it back from a thief, you do so through several layers of other people's financial gain. That's what watching Jarhead was like for me.
This feeling -- which snowballed throughout the movie -- was surprising, even though I, like everybody else who signed up to watch Jarhead, should have expected something similar. After all, watch it and you're already on the Genre Bandwagon. But the film's subject material should dictate genre categorization. I hate to say it, but Jarhead is a collage of pop-culture war genre traits first, and a war film second. It's a student who's spend all semester drunk, and is pulling every trick in the book in the final exams to coax us into letting it pass.
Although the setting of the film was during the Gulf War, that is no excuse for using the same over-exposed style and handheld shots as Three Kings. The script was too heavily reliant on Full Metal Jacket's memorable throwbacks to something original, ground-breaking and defining. Scenes from Apocalypse Now were creatively dumped onto the screen verbatim, which removed from the movie's slow tension build.
Most, if not all, of the movie was just that -- tension building. It was like watching a Harold Pinter play. Excruciating. There was far too much time spent in the middle of the desert, accomplishing nothing. I'm well aware that this was the intention, but I only understood the characters when I saw the deleted scenes. For this reason, I would have kept a lot of them in.
There's a lot of power in seeing a man freak out because he can't find the gas mask to which he has become atached, to the point of paranoia, during a raid. As I see it, derailing the momentum of the film momentarily to emphasize what war does to men isn't such a bad idea, seeing as though nothing else is happening. After all, the film's standfirst is "Every Man Fights his Own War". I didn't care about the characters, because they didn't do anything. Perhaps one guy was a little nuts, although he seemed like that from the beginning. That's all the film gives you to chew on, honestly. You've seen all the rest before.
This was the one thing that Jarhead couldn't borrow from all the other trailblazing war films that have come before, and recur through, it. And it's a damn shame, too. It's a below average film in a genre that studies one of the most rich facets of human behavior.
Sigh. But that's enough out of me. People, what did you think?
The winning package had to be gritty, like Full Metal Jacket. It shouldn't take itself too seriously, see also Three Kings. Topical subject material, a-la Apocalypse Now, wouldn't go astray. The blend should remind me of a war film, but still surprise me with originality.
Imagine having your favorite guitar stolen years ago. The emotion has now well and truly subsided. You stumble into a pawn shop, see it on the rack, and had no choice but to buy it back. What's worse is that not only do you have to buy it back from a thief, you do so through several layers of other people's financial gain. That's what watching Jarhead was like for me.
This feeling -- which snowballed throughout the movie -- was surprising, even though I, like everybody else who signed up to watch Jarhead, should have expected something similar. After all, watch it and you're already on the Genre Bandwagon. But the film's subject material should dictate genre categorization. I hate to say it, but Jarhead is a collage of pop-culture war genre traits first, and a war film second. It's a student who's spend all semester drunk, and is pulling every trick in the book in the final exams to coax us into letting it pass.
Although the setting of the film was during the Gulf War, that is no excuse for using the same over-exposed style and handheld shots as Three Kings. The script was too heavily reliant on Full Metal Jacket's memorable throwbacks to something original, ground-breaking and defining. Scenes from Apocalypse Now were creatively dumped onto the screen verbatim, which removed from the movie's slow tension build.
Most, if not all, of the movie was just that -- tension building. It was like watching a Harold Pinter play. Excruciating. There was far too much time spent in the middle of the desert, accomplishing nothing. I'm well aware that this was the intention, but I only understood the characters when I saw the deleted scenes. For this reason, I would have kept a lot of them in.
There's a lot of power in seeing a man freak out because he can't find the gas mask to which he has become atached, to the point of paranoia, during a raid. As I see it, derailing the momentum of the film momentarily to emphasize what war does to men isn't such a bad idea, seeing as though nothing else is happening. After all, the film's standfirst is "Every Man Fights his Own War". I didn't care about the characters, because they didn't do anything. Perhaps one guy was a little nuts, although he seemed like that from the beginning. That's all the film gives you to chew on, honestly. You've seen all the rest before.
This was the one thing that Jarhead couldn't borrow from all the other trailblazing war films that have come before, and recur through, it. And it's a damn shame, too. It's a below average film in a genre that studies one of the most rich facets of human behavior.
Sigh. But that's enough out of me. People, what did you think?
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rogar-BigGrin(DBG) ). And Ocean's Eleven was an entertaining popcorn movie. But then came the movie star sin of Ocean's Twelve and I see where Ocean's Thirteen is currently filming. Do we really need that?
