Movie Review: Jarhead

"D.I. Fitch: What the fuck are you even doing here?
Anthony 'Swoff' Swofford: Sir, I got lost on the way to college, sir."

Jarhead is a movie about what it means to be desperate, to be far from home, to be a marine in the gulf war (or any war). The main character, Swoff (Jake Gyllenhaal), is a 20 year old recruit who has no better options than to join the Corps. Staff Sgt. Sykes (Jamie Foxx), is the all-too-cool leader of STA, an elite eight-person sniper team of diehards, goofballs and characters, of which Swoff is a member. The movie revolves around the daily lives, aspirations and hardships of the STA team during the gulf war.

The movie was a good watch - but not groundbreaking as it could have been. There were a few memorable scenes, some very funny moments, and some nice cinematography (burning oil fields in the desert). However, there lacked a finesse which could have made it a more memorable film - for example, there were a few scenes that should have been more real but seemed like it was part of a big joke (such as when Swoff loses it and threatens an innocuous fellow private at rifle-point). All in all though, Gyllenhaal is polished in his performance- from his craze to fire his rifle to his yearning for and growing suspicion of his hottie girlfriend back home.

A noteworthy performance was by actor Peter Sarsgaard, who plays a believable good-older brother type role. I usually am turned off by those types of roles, but Sarsgaard played it subtley enough. Nice.

Don't have much more to say about Jarhead, except that my favorite marine has verified that much of it is depicted at least close to what is realistic.