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Directed by Sam Mendes, Screenplay by William Broyles Jr. Universal Pictures, 2005. Color, 2 hours and 3 minutes.I am not usually one for military movies, but I really enjoyed this. Jarhead is less about the action and the killing, and much more about the camaraderie, the journey, and the descent into insanity. It also deals briefly with the assimilation of marines back into American society, and in one shot, the never-ending aspect of war.
All around, the performances were amazing (Peter Sarsgaard was poorly cast, in my opinion, but he did a good job). Jamie Foxx was great to watch and very easy to love and hate simultaneously. Jake Gyllenhaal may not have been covering any new ground here, necessarily, but he did it very well. His cabin fever had shadows of Donnie Darko, but definitely became a character specific to the film.
Even though a desert can be pretty boring, Mendes does a great job of keeping every shot exciting to look at, and does well to rely more on the emotional bonds between the men and the character development than the visual aesthetic (there's only so much you can do in a desert, after all). He also uses music in very interesting ways to communicate the sarcastic, dark humor in the beginning of the film.
Not a lot of action like you would expect from a war film, but a lot of fun and a lot of thinking.
Four out of Five Stars.
