Instead, the film heightens the good-vs-evil stakes by supplying Kyle with two fictionalized enemies: "The Butcher," an al-Qaeda in Iraq enforcer famed for his brutality, and "Mustafa," a Syrian who once won Olympic medals for marksmanship, but now spends his days as an al-Qaeda sniper, picking off American soldiers as they go about their noble work.
There's a very interesting movie to be made about that idea, and about what it means to be heroic during a misguided war. In real life, Chris Kyle argued that America owed its troops support because those troops did not get to choose the wars they fought, or the strategy they followed: they wrote the government a blank check for their lives and waited to see if it would get cashed. The Iraq War was not a response to 9/11: this was a war America chose, officially based on reports of weapons of mass destruction that were implausible at the time, and that have since been proven false. Nor are "George Bush," "Sunni," "Shia," or "weapons of mass destruction."Īs Zack Beauchamp points out, this depiction of the war is breathtakingly dishonest. Th e words "Saddam Hussein" are never uttered in the movie. The inference we're supposed to gather is clear: that Kyle is fighting the same people who attacked America in 19.īy contrast, the actual reasons for the Iraq war go unmentioned. And when Kyle gets to Iraq, his commander explains that they are hunting the leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
The film finds time for entire scenes of Kyle viewing TV news reports about al-Qaeda's 1998 bombings of US embassies, and the planes hitting the Twin Towers on 9/11. To maximize the bigness and badness of its available wolves, American Sniper rewrites history, turning the Iraq War into a response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. While it's never great to see a movie falsify a true story, American Sniper's disdainful attitude towards the truth is especially disingenuous in light of its broader "you're either with us, or you're a naive sheep" narrative.
The movie's "wolf" problemĪmerican Sniper stacks its narrative deck, using imaginary history and characters to give Kyle a suitably evil foe to fight. Iraqis, by contrast, are not sheep: in this movie they're either wolves themselves, or nameless collateral damage.
That includes fellow US troops who lack Kyle's skill, or who dare to question the war. The movie's Big Bad Wolves are al-Qaeda terrorists, led by a psychopathic child-torturer and his marksman sidekick.Īnd the sheep? They would be the other Americans who lack Chris Kyle's vision and fortitude, and fail to understand that you're either with us or against us. In that metaphor, Kyle is America's border collie, shepherding the weak and vulnerable away from harm.
That means that it's up to the sheepdogs to protect them from harm. The sheep are good people, but vulnerable to harm because they're too naive to understand that evil exists. There are, he explains, three types of people in the world: wolves, sheep, and sheepdogs. The movie's central moral metaphor is voiced by Kyle's father during a flashback to his childhood. Warning: This article discusses the plot of American Sniper in its entirety. And if the film's historic box office success and many award nominations are anything to go by, that propaganda is frighteningly effective. In the world of this movie, the Iraq war is an extension of the war on terror heroes with guns are our only hope of salvation and anyone who doubts that is part of the problem. The result is a sort of Hezbollah martyr video for the Fox News set recruitment propaganda for culture-war extremists. It adopted an "honesty shmonesty" approach to the war: in its retelling, Iraq was a fight of Good Americans against Bad Terrorists, led by Chris Kyle, the Good-est American of them all. It's a movie about a black-and-white distinction between good and evil, but it is set almost entirely in the Iraq War, which can only be honestly portrayed in shades of gray.įaced with a choice between altering its narrative to account for that gray versus altering the facts of history, the film chose the latter.