American Sniper

A lot of guns. A lot of shooting. It's always difficult to make a dramatic film based on real life events and real people. I think that early in development it is always best to ask whether the subject matter should be presented as a documentary rather than as a dramatic work. If you are going to take real-life events and (try) to make a drama out of it, then you have several fold as much work ahead of you than if your characters and story are entirely fictional. You will have to re-present the true story in a way that will keep the audience interested. In that sense, I think there was somewhat of a missed opportunity here. All things considered, there was the potential to take this true story and transform it into a "Top Gun" style of military film, but for at least the first half of the footage it moved far too fast and lacked depth with not much of a story to go on. For example, Kyle finds his wife and wins her over far too easily and far too quickly. I highly doubt it happened that easily in reality, and if it did, the recreation of the events was not believable. Too much ground was covered; it would have been better to cover less ground in a more credible fashion. Then came the bulk of the movie: a lot of guns; a lot of shooting. There is obviously a market for this as the film was immensely successful at the box office. Personally, I found the military action very tiresome, boring and repetitive. The movie did bring some value in that it succeeded (at times) in showing us Kyle's mental anguish and the excruciating reality of his work. The final third of the movie also brought some value where we did see him try to reenter the normalcy of life with great difficulty, but even this was not believable at certain moments--as experienced in first third of the film.