American Sniper (2015)

"I'm willing to meet my creator and answer for every shot that I took…”

Seeing the trailer for 'American Sniper' in the cinema was a breath of fresh air amongst the stale and generic trailers that were circulating before the Oscar buzz picked up.

It was an intense and well crafted trailer that doesn’t give anything away but whets your palette and gives you a taste of what the film is going to be about. Despite hearing that the recently unpredictable Clint Eastwood was directing, I was excited to see what this movie could deliver, especially with Bradley Cooper at the helm. 

Chris Kyle, a U.S. Navy SEAL sniper, becomes a legend on the battlefield as the deadliest sniper in U.S. history but struggles to cope with the psychological consequences of his tours in Iraq.

I went into 'American sniper' with relatively high expectations and I think they were met overall.

Bradley Cooper is a revelation as Chris Kyle. Not only is he built like a brick wall for the role but the way he presents himself as the sniper and war veteran is unlike anything we’ve seen him do before.

What impressed me most was his technical knowledge and his mannerisms with the rifle. There was not one moment in the film that I didn’t believe that he had been holding a weapon all of his life. I just accepted the fact that he was a soldier and moved past it, which is testament to his ability and his commitment to the combat realism that Eastwood desired. The way he held the sniper and how he interacted with it while delivering a credible performance was staggering. It became part of him, like an extension of his own arm, and you got the sense that he had rebuilt Chris Kyle from the ground up and got deep inside him as a character.

The physical transformation that Cooper went through also surprised me. We're used to the heartthrob actor from ‘The Hangover’ and ‘Limitless’ but instead, we get an intimidating and powerful warrior who you would not want to be facing down in a war situation. He gained around 40 pounds of muscle for the role which is nearly 3 stones in UK terms. Any actor who gains 3 stones, not in fat but in muscle, is a force to be reckoned with. After seeing the real Chris Kyle and his mannerisms, I began to realise just how well Bradley Cooper had captured him. This is an impressive performance from an actor who I’m beginning to respect more and more with each performance. I definitely agree with the Oscar nomination for Best Actor and I think he should be a contender.

Sienna Miller was unfortunately relatively forgettable in her supporting role as Chris Kyle's wife - Taya. I'm not entirely sure if it was down to the writing of her character, her acting ability or a mixture of both but I felt that she was an interchangeable character. She was functional in the role but I felt like you could have plucked Sienna Miller out of the role and dropped another actress in and it wouldn't have changed my opinion of the film. It's so frustrating dealing with weak female characters in a film that features so many complex male characters.

There are some heart-stopping scenes in the film that will leave you breathless and questioning the moral judgement of Chris Kyle. He has to make some extremely tough calls, including whether or not to execute a child who he believes is going to bomb his comrades. There are several more but the one featured in the trailer is pivotal to the plot and his character development. The heart-stopping scenes don’t only come on the battlefield but in the human relationships that we see on screen. It could have gotten quite boring quite quickly if it was purely an action flick about a sniper but we get so many layers and emotions wrapped up in the action and the drama.

It’s interesting to watch Chris Kyle dealing with the trauma of war. He has a confirmed 160 kills and it’s impossible not to be damaged by the experiences that he had in Iraq. It’s only when he comes home that you realise just how far he’s gone. He volunteers to go back for 4 tours and it takes its toll, not only on him, but on his family too. This psychological struggle running parallel with the physical combat of war is what really highlights the emotional conflicts of ‘American Sniper’ and helps us understand him on a human level. Clint Eastwood and Bradley Cooper do a fantastic job of bringing the legend down and showing him as the man.

After doing a little research into the real Chris Kyle I did learn some interesting facts that do somewhat contradict the film but I was determined not to get hung up on them as it is only based on a true story. I don’t believe Chris Kyle is exactly how he is represented in the film and I believe ‘American Sniper’ to be a great work of fiction. It is known that Chris Kyle believed the Iraq soldiers to be “savages" and was a notoriously violent man who was proud of his actions rather than modest and damaged like in the film.

This does taint my post-viewing experience as the more I read, the more I question about the film.

What really let me down in ‘American Sniper’ was the two dimensional representation of Iraq. The soldiers were all faceless and blandly evil, some to the point of being almost pantomime. This is a gross misinterpretation of Iraq and is insulting to the audience. You could argue that it is Chris Kyle’s point of view of Iraq (which would have worked if it was more accurate to the real story) but that’s not how it’s presented in the film. These were men and women just like us and just like Chris Kyle but they’re so demonised that it becomes almost laughable… Not to say that these atrocities weren’t caused by some “evil" people but it isn’t always as black and white as ‘American Sniper’ portrays it.

Overall, I think that ‘American Sniper’ was a fantastically made film by Clint Eastwood with a powerful performance from Bradley Cooper. It makes you think while entertaining you, which is always an enjoyable experience. It deals in a grey area of the human experience with Chris Kyle but is slightly two dimensional in representing his enemies. It is very misleading if you believe it all to be fact and has a slight whiff of propaganda floating around it but, despite this, it is an enjoyable work of fiction that should be treated as such...