American Sniper

Based on the real life story of the American sniper Chris Kyle, the latest movie from actor-director Clint Eastwood is something that will touch our heart with its deep rooted narrative. Even though the treatment of the movie continuously reminded me of the Academy award winner Hurt Locker, the life in the story with all the ups and downs a man had to face because of his profession succeeds in impressing the viewer.

The story is about the most successful sniper of the US Army, Chris Kyle. Chris joins the army and after the 9/11 attacks, he is deployed to Iraq as a sniper. Obsessed with the love for his country, Chris spends almost 1000 days in the battlefield over his 4 visits to Iraq and killed 160 during the process of covering his own men. Film deeply analyses him as a person by showing us the conflicts, struggles and many other levels of problems he had to face in life because of his reputation as the lethal sniper.

If you have seen the movie Hurt Locker, you will find resemblance in treatment and because of that you might tend to predict that something unpredictable is going to happen in the next moment. For me, that was the only drawback of this movie which beautifully conceived a man’s mental state and emotional transition in a very rooted way. There is a scene were the doctor tells Kyle about his blood pressure and Clint Eastwood has succeeded in creating certain scenes which actually manages to increase the blood pressure of the viewer. By shuttling the screenplay gently between the personal life and military life of Chris Kyle, American Sniper easily goes beyond the categorization of being a war movie.

On screen Bradley Cooper has done a good job as “The Legend”. The pressure, the obsession and the gradual transformation of being a normal parent was depicted nicely by him. Sienna Miller also did well as Taya Kyle.

The realistic way of making from Clint Eastwood definitely helps the movie in being a different one in terms of presentation. The camera angles and visuals are less agile, making the frames filled with agony, which was exactly the requirement. As I said, the screenplay nicely mixes the time he spent in uniform and with family to make it look like a story of a human being than a documentary of a military operation. Cinematography is good and the edits were really good. I liked the mild and effective usage of background score. All the shots looked very real, so if there are any visual effects in these shots, I must admit that it was fab.

Overall, American Sniper is one classier biopic from Hollywood. It’s a movie that succeeds in presenting a soldier very broadly within its 133 minutes runtime. The rating for the academy award nominated American sniper is 4/5. Don’t miss it.