Everlong wrote:DanielsonTHAGOAT wrote:Also within the first 5 minutes of the film, it establishes the idea that all women dressed in traditional Islamic clothing are terrorists too, WOMEN. Like who did the research for this movie? Women in Iraq were constantly oppressed so it's laughable that they're painted as terrorists. Throughout the film, CHILDERN AND WOMEN ARE PORTRAYED AS KILLERS.
After having actually seen the movie now, I have to say that if this was your takeaway from those scenes then it was a huge overreaction.
Iraqis are portrayed as "savages" and mostly evil terrorists
The narrative sets up the war as a morality play: there are evil terrorists, and Chris Kyle needs to kill them. It's as simple as that.
In an early speech that basically defines the film's politics, Chris Kyle's father declares that there are three kind of people: sheep, the wolves that prey on them, and the sheep dogs that hold them at bay. "We're not raising any sheep in this family," Kyle's father tells his son, "and I'll whup your ass if you ever become a wolf."
That means Kyle is a sheepdog. Kyle and his buddies in uniform are good guys hunting terrorists. It's hardly a surprise, then, that all of the violence in Iraq is attributed to simple evil, and that Iraq's millions of citizens are often barely distinguishable from al-Qaeda.
Kyle repeatedly refers to Iraqis as "savages," and the film makes no effort to prove him wrong. Two out of three Iraqi children the film focuses on pick up weapons (though one puts it down before firing), and the third tortured by another Iraqi. When another soldier questions whether Kyle may have shot an innocent man, Kyle simply shouts him down. The issue never comes up again.
In fact, many thousands of Iraqis died fighting al-Qaeda, and the group's defeat never would have been possible without the 2005 Anbar Awakening, in which many Iraqi communities in al-Qaeda hotspots took up arms to uproot the group.
The film also skips over one of the ugliest but most important aspects of the war: the divisions between Iraq's Sunni and its Shias, both of whom fought the US as well as one another, in what ultimately became a civil war. The words Sunni and Shia are hardly mentioned in the film, if at all. The idea that Iraqis could be much else other than terrorists, or that an Iraqi might take up arms for any reason other than to kill Americans, doesn't really factor in American Sniper's narrative.
Again, it would be understandable for a mainstream Hollywood production to not want to delve into sectarian politics. But rather than merely skirting Iraq's sectarian conflict, the film instead replaces it with a narrative that the war was all about America versus al-Qaeda, which is simply false and misleading.
http://www.vox.com/2015/1/21/7641189/am ... er-history
