Their sergeant is a hard-ass, not because he is pathological but because he wants to prepare them to save their lives. Against this existential void, the men of the sniper unit shore up friendships and rituals. THE THEME SONG FROM JARHEAD THE MOVIE MOVIEThe movie captures the tone of Camus' narrator, who knows what has happened but not why, nor what it means to him, nor why it happens to him. If Russell had Catch-22 as his guide, it is instructive that the book Swofford is reading is The Stranger by Camus. Russell's " Three Kings," also about the Gulf War. "Jarhead" was directed by Sam Mendes (" American Beauty"), and it is the other side of the coin of David O. They are brave, they are skilled, and death comes unexpectedly from invisible foes in the midst of routine. Yet many of its frustrations are the same, and I am reminded of the documentary " Gunner Palace," about an Army field artillery division that is headquartered in the ruins of a palace once occupied by Saddam's son, Uday. Now we are involved in a war that does require soldiers on the ground, against an enemy that no longer helpfully wears uniforms. Sykes warns them to expect 70,000 casualties in the first days of the war, but as we recall, the Iraqis caved in and the war was over. Territory that took three months to occupy in World War I and three weeks in Vietnam now takes 10 minutes. In a war like this, the ground soldier has been made obsolete by air power. He comes back with his report: "Somebody shot three of their camels." Swofford and one of the Arabs meet on neutral ground. They go on patrols in the desert, looking for nothing in the middle of nowhere, and their moment of greatest tension comes when they meet eight Arabs with five camels. These are not the colorful dogfaces of World War II movies with their poker games, or the druggies in " Apocalypse Now." They have no wisecracks, we see no drugs, they get drunk when they can, and there is a Wall of Shame plastered with the photos of the girls back home who have dumped them. THE THEME SONG FROM JARHEAD THE MOVIE TVThe narration includes one passage that sounds lifted straight from the book, in which Swofford lists the ways they get through the days: They train, they sleep, they watch TV and videos, they get in pointless fights, they read letters from home and write letters to home, and mostly they masturbate. Sykes briefs them about Saddam Hussein's invasion of the Kuwait oil fields, but says their immediate task is to guard the oil of "our friends, the Sauds." This they do by killing time. "Jarhead" is a story like Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That, in the way it sees the big picture entirely in terms of the small details. Others in the group include borderline psychos and screw-ups but mostly just average young Americans who have decided the only thing worse than fighting a war is waiting to fight one - in the desert, when the temperature is 112 and it would be great for the TV cameras if they played a football game while wearing their anti-gas suits. Sykes ( Jamie Foxx), who knows why he serves: He loves his job. Their small unit of scout-snipers has been led through training by Staff Sgt. His best friend is his spotter, Troy ( Peter Sarsgaard). She persists, and finally he looks in the camera and says: "I'm 20 years old, and I was dumb enough to sign a contract." He has already given two or three routine answers. At one point, Swofford ( Jake Gyllenhaal) is being interviewed by a network newswoman who asks him why he serves. It is unlike most war movies in that it focuses entirely on the personal experience of a young man caught up in the military process. The movie is based on the best-selling 2003 memoir Jarhead by Anthony Swofford, who served in the first Gulf War. Let him take the shot to erase for a second the cloud of oil droplets he lives in, the absence of the sun, the horizon lined with the plumes of burning oil wells. His spotter, Troy, goes berserk: "Let him take the shot!" Let him, that is, kill one enemy as his payback for the hell of basic training, the limbo of the desert, the sand and heat, the torture of months of waiting, the sight of a highway traffic jam made of burned vehicles and crisp charred corpses.
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