Thanks to the triumph ofAmerican beauty, Sam Mendes has won Hollywood legitimacy to carry out singular projects. For his third feature he chose the atypical story of a marine during the first Gulf War: Jarhead: The end of innocence. Embark Jake Gyllenhaal, Jamie Foxx and Peter Sarsgaard in the middle of the desert to challenge the conventions of the war film.
In 2000, Sam Mendes joined Delbert Mann, Robert Redford, James L. Brooks and Kevin Costner in the pantheon of Academy Awards for Best Director for their first contribution in the 7th art. Continue by sending Tom Hanks and Paul Newman The ways of perdition then start looking for a new project.
In the same period he appears in the literature department Jarheadin which a certain Anthony Swofford talks about his participation in the operation storm In the desert. The director reads it and falls by his own admission under the spell of this “mix of machismo, humor, surreal situations and very acute political observations “. His next subject is all found.
Especially since the war film has the (sand) wind in the sails : The fall of the black hawk et We Were Soldiers took the place of We need to save Private Ryan. The kingdom, Green area or minesweeper will mark the 2000s. Sam Mendes is part of this movement, two decades before returning to the genre with the (false) spectacular sequence of 1917.
Horror Medal
Apocalypse never
A recruit with a young physique first undergoes intense military training under the orders of a more than demanding instructor, before going to fight a camp of well-identified “bad guys”. On paper, Jarhead it has all the hallmarks of a conventional war movie. Except that if you lean on this classic canvas it is to better deflect it.
of the operation storm In the desert, the general public has preserved distant television images of the bombing of Iraqi targets, aimed at ending the conflict as quickly as possible with a minimum of casualties (western part, of course). Sam Mendes, definitely the kind of guy who filmed the stands during a football matchhe prefers to focus his attention on the infantrymen who were waiting in the nearby desert for someone to deign to call them.
When you’ve been in the desert too long
In the continuity of this partial focus, all the expectations of the story are circumvented. The glorious military training is taken from its more mundane side: between latrines and use of laxatives, the characters are constantly brought back to their humanity and not transcended from their function. Even the so symbolic trumpet is missing, and must be mercifully forged.
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