If American Sniper is a great war movie, then its opening serves as a heartbreaking point of entry into a contemporary tragedy about soldiers, veterans, and the kinds of violence and cruelty and death that emerge in and around battlefields both foreign and domestic.
If American Sniper is the first vigorous cinematic defense of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and this is a bad thing, then its opening is exemplary of the pulpy, jingoistic, and ultimately sanitized violence that the film in its duration celebrates.
If American Sniper is a great antiwar film, then its opening places front and center two things that should never, ever happen: the murder of a child, and the decision to murder a child, with or without cause. If American Sniper is, beyond all else, basically mediocre, then its opening is a perfect illustration of the way in which the Iraq war, in its portrayal, is removed of all real geopolitical, social, and historical context, instead becoming a sequence of decontextualized scenes shot down the barrel of a sniper rifle that might as well have been cribbed from a Call of Duty.
Is my pulse supposed to quicken? A simple answer is probably: yes. This battlefield Eastwood has flung us into is engrossing, dangerous, fast, and precarious. At first glance, maybe American Sniper delivers. Look a bit closer, though, and you begin to notice how the way in which the sequence conveys its content seems to constantly undermine its own success. Think, for a moment, about all the possible sources of suspense you could wring out of the following scene: a Navy sniper is tasked with making a snap judgment as to whether a child and his mother pose a threat to a convoy for which said sniper is providing recon.
What are this child and his mother doing near a tank squadron in the middle of a war zone? What will the outcome be? Will mother and child make it out alive? Will they take any soldiers out with them? Is the sniper any good? Will he miss? The entire thing becomes less suspenseful than just sad. Clint Eastwood is many things to many people, but contemporary critics tend to agree that he is an auteur , i. This is to say that it strikes me as analytically inaccurate and insufficient to read this scene as an instance of failed suspense, and to see American Sniper as a sloppy film.
