Jarhead is a film based on U. The title comes from the slang term used to refer to Marines sometimes by Marines themselves. The film begins with voice-over narration on a black screen, as Anthony Swofford Jake Gyllenhaal , waxes philosophically about a soldier whose hands forever remember the grip of a rifle, whatever else they do in life.
Swofford is then shown in a U. Marine Corps boot camp, being brutalized by a drill instructor in a scene reminiscent of Full Metal Jacket. After finishing boot, "Swoff" is dispatched to Camp Pendleton in , where he is subjected to a cruel joke played on him by the senior Marines. This is a popular tattoo amongst Marines. He faints upon sight of the iron. After regaining consciousness, he realizes to his relief that the senior Marines had switched the hot iron with another room temperature iron.
After arduous training sessions that claim the life of one recruit, he becomes a sniper and is paired with Troy as his spotter. Although the Marines are very eager to see some combat action, they are forced to hydrate, wait, patrol the nearby area and orient themselves to the arid environment.
When some field reporters appear, Sykes forces his unit to demonstrate their NBC suits in a game of American football, even under the degree heat. While the cameras roll, the game develops into a rowdy dogpile, with some Marines playfully miming sex acts. Sykes, embarrassed by his platoon's rude manners and poor discipline, removes the cameras and crew from the area; the Marines are later punished by being forced to build and take down a massive pyramid of sandbags in a rainy night.
During the long wait, some of the Marines fear their wives and girlfriends at home will be unfaithful. A public board displays the photos of women who have ended their relationships with members of the unit. Swofford himself begins to suspect that his girlfriend is, or will soon be, unfaithful.
The most public and humiliating of these befalls Dettman Marty Papazian , who discovers an innocent looking copy of The Deer Hunter on VHS sent from his wife, which the men are all seated to watch, is actually a homemade pornographic movie tape of her having sex with their neighbor, apparently made as revenge for Dettman's own promiscuity.
During an impromptu Christmas party, Fergus Brian Geraghty , a member of Swofford's unit, accidentally sets fire to a tent and a crate of flares. Swofford gets the blame because he was supposed to be on watch, but had Fergus sit in for him. As a consequence, Swofford is demoted from Lance Corporal E-3 to Private E-1 and is forced to undertake the degrading task of burning excrement. The punishments, the heat and the boredom, combined with suspicions of his girlfriend's infidelity and feelings of isolation, temporarily drive Swofford to the point of mental breakdown.
He threatens and nearly shoots fellow Marine Fergus. After the long stand in the desert, Operation Desert Storm , the coalition force's ground campaign, begins, and the Marines are dispatched to the Saudi-Kuwaiti border. Briefly before the action begins, Swofford learns from Sykes that Troy concealed his criminal record when enlisting and will be discharged after the end of hostilities.
Following an accidental air attack from friendly forces, the Marines advance through the desert, facing no enemies on the ground. Casualties are taken when friendly fire from an A close air support aircraft hits U. The troops march through the Highway of Death , strewn with burnt vehicles and remains of charred bodies, a product of the bombing campaign. Later, the Marines encounter burning oil wells, lit by the retreating Iraqis, and they attempt to dig sleeping holes as a rain of crude oil falls from the sky.
Before they can finish them Sykes orders the squad to move to where the wind prevents the oil from raining on them. While digging new sleeping holes, Swoff discovers Fowler has defiled an Iraqi corpse which drives Swoff to the point of wanting to fight him.
However he merely takes the body and buries it somewhere else. Swofford and Troy are finally given a combat mission. Their order is to shoot two Iraqi officers, supposedly located in a control tower at a battle-damaged airport. The two take up positions in a deserted building, but moments after Swofford pinpoints one of the officers in his sights, another team of Marines appears and calls in an air strike. Troy, desperate to make a kill, pleads with the officer in charge Dennis Haysbert to let them take the shot.
When his pleas are denied, Troy breaks down in a fit of despair and weeps. Moments later the airport is bombed by U. Swofford and Troy linger at the site in a daze, losing track of time and missing their pick-up. With night falling, they try to navigate the desert but get lost. Distant cries in the darkness frighten them, and as they begin to sense that the sounds are coming from beyond a ridge, they ready their weapons and prepare to descend.
They see an encampment in the distance, but on closer look they recognize it as their base camp, and the sounds as Marine voices. The war is over, they learn, and scores of Marines celebrate this amidst a bonfire. In a climactic scene Swofford tells Troy he never fired his rifle, getting a response of "You can do it now".
He then fires a round in the air from his sniper rifle and the other Marines, who also never had a chance to fire their weapons, follow suit, emptying magazines into the night sky. Anthony "Swoff" Swofford, a Camus-reading kid from Sacramento, enlists in the Marines in the late s.
He malingers during boot camp, but makes it through as a sniper, paired with the usually-reliable Troy. After days of boredom, adrenaline, heat, worry about his girlfriend finding someone else, losing it and nearly killing a mate, demotion, latrine cleaning, faulty gas masks, and desert football, Desert Storm begins. In less than five days, it's over, but not before Swoff sees burned bodies, flaming oil derricks, an oil-drenched horse, and maybe a chance at killing.
Where does all the testosterone go? Jarhead the self-imposed moniker of the Marines follows "Swoff," a third-generation enlistee, from a sobering stint in boot camp to active duty, sporting a sniper's rifle and a hundred-pound ruck on his back through Middle East deserts with no cover from intolerable heat or from Iraqi soldiers, always potentially just over the next horizon.
Swoff and his fellow Marines sustain themselves with sardonic humanity and wicked comedy on blazing desert fields in a country they don't understand against an enemy they can't see for a cause they don't fully fathom Sykes Jamie Foxx , who knows why he serves: He loves his job. Others in the group include borderline psychos and screw-ups but mostly just average young Americans who have decided the only thing worse than fighting a war is waiting to fight one -- in the desert, when the temperature is and it would be great for the TV cameras if they played a football game while wearing their anti-gas suits.
Sykes briefs them about Saddam Hussein's invasion of the Kuwait oil fields, but says their immediate task is to guard the oil of "our friends, the Sauds. The narration includes one passage that sounds lifted straight from the book, in which Swofford lists the ways they get through the days: They train, they sleep, they watch TV and videos, they get in pointless fights, they read letters from home and write letters to home, and mostly they masturbate.
These are not the colorful dogfaces of World War II movies with their poker games, or the druggies in " Apocalypse Now. They go on patrols in the desert, looking for nothing in the middle of nowhere, and their moment of greatest tension comes when they meet eight Arabs with five camels.
They sense a trap. Their fingers are on their triggers. They are in formation for action. Swofford and one of the Arabs meet on neutral ground.
He comes back with his report: "Somebody shot three of their camels. In a war like this, the ground soldier has been made obsolete by air power. Territory that took three months to occupy in World War I and three weeks in Vietnam now takes 10 minutes. Sykes warns them to expect 70, casualties in the first days of the war, but as we recall, the Iraqis caved in and the war was over. Now we are involved in a war that does require soldiers on the ground, against an enemy that no longer helpfully wears uniforms.
Yet many of its frustrations are the same, and I am reminded of the documentary " Gunner Palace ," about an Army field artillery division that is headquartered in the ruins of a palace once occupied by Saddam's son, Uday.
They are brave, they are skilled, and death comes unexpectedly from invisible foes in the midst of routine. Russell's " Three Kings ," also about the Gulf War. The movie captures the tone of Camus' narrator, who knows what has happened but not why, nor what it means to him, nor why it happens to him.
Against this existential void, the men of the sniper unit shore up friendships and rituals. Their sergeant is a hard-ass, not because he is pathological but because he wants to prepare them to save their lives.
They are ready.
0コメント