Jarhead Movie Review

“A story: A man fires a rifle for many years, and he goes to war. And afterward he turns the rifle in at the armory, and he believes he’s finished with the rifle. But no matter what else he might do with his hands; love a woman, build a house, change his son’s diaper; his hands remember the rifle.” Jarhead is not a war movie about a physical war between countries; it is about an internal war a soldier faces during, and following a physical war in which he is a witness. The main character, Tony Swofford tells his story starting at boot camp, through the first Gulf war, and shortly after his discharge; in an attempt to give the audience a better understanding of what happens within a soldiers mind as a result of being in combat. It is incredibly hard to imagine the toll that being in the Marine Corps, and being involved in such a situation, could take on your mind and body but this movie makes a really good attempt. Unlike most war movies Jarhead does not focus on the enemy or the war at hand, it gives us here at home a little inside look at what the soldiers experience and why their lives and minds are changed forever. Tony shows us how boot camp tore him down and rebuilt him as a killing machine, “I wanted the pink mist,” he says referring to the splatter of blood seen through the scope of the rifle of a Marine sniper. There are scenes of the soldiers watching the old war movie, Apocalypse Now, following along with the music, and thirsting for the first sight of bloodshed. The soldiers soon get their orders to go overseas and they think that their war is about to begin. When they fly into the desert and get their orders to guard the oil fields they assume that this is just until the war actually begins. When “their war” finally does begin, instead of using their carefully honed skills, they are faced with the reality that, unlike the movies they watched with such fascination, foot soldiers are all but useless in our age of technology.
They face incredible