PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 11/3/05)

As a group of Marines sits in the desert in the first Gulf war, the oil fields of Kuwait burning behind them in the night, a helicopter passes overhead, blasting the Doors’ “Break on Through.” One soldier, caught, as his brother Marines are, between the mind-deadening boredom of waiting for something to happen and the murderous anxiety of wondering just what will happen, screams at the chopper: “That’s Vietnam music, man! Can’t we get our own fuckin’ music?”

Jarhead gives Desert Storm’s Semper Fi guys their own fuckin’ music — Nirvana and Public Enemy turn up like clockwork — and here the movie’s point is made: the first Gulf war is the first postmodern war, in which the titular jarheads (named not only after the regulation Marine haircut but the result of the brain-draining process of boot camp) watch screenings of Apocalypse Now to get pumped up for combat. Jarhead was adapted by screenwriter William Broyles Jr. and director Sam Mendes from a memoir by Anthony Swofford. While the author is no Paul Fussell or Eugene Sledge, given Broyles and Mendes’s dual-pronged approach to adaptation — pump up and dumb down — he might as well be. Two pertinent examples: an exchange from the book wherein a couple of soldiers happen upon Swofford reading The Iliad, in which all the participants are painted as reasonably intelligent, is thrown out in favor of a cheap (and old) joke involving the mispronunciation of “Camus.” A late-in-the-book episode in which the new breed of jarhead meets up with a homeless Vietnam vet represented a pretty loaded proposition to begin with; the book’s account looks like a marvel of restraint put up against Broyles and Mendes’ cinematic elbow-nudges.

The movie gains in interest once it seemingly stumbles upon the theme of how soldiers (embodied by a group of first-rank actors, Jake Gyllenhaal, Jamie Foxx, Lucas Black, and Peter Sarsgaard among them) who have been relentlessly trained to kill deal with a combat situation in which it’s highly unlikely that they’re going to get the chance to do so. But by that time it’s a little late, and all told, you’d do better to program a DVD triple feature of the first half of Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness (the definitive Kuwaiti oil field movie), and Anthony Mann’s underseen Men in War. That Jarhead is an impressive technical achievement is a given, but ultimately this picture is the last thing any war movie should be: innocuous.
—Glenn Kenny