Jarhead (DVD)

This highly underrated film will come to define the (first) Gulf War in a way that Apocalypse Now defined Vietnam. That is not to say that it can yet be elevated to that lofty status, but that it captures and evokes the time with brutal cynicism mixed with a taste for the surreal in a similar way to Copola's masterpiece. In many ways it also resembles Full Metal Jacket, beginning as it does in the training camp with the anonomous 'jarheads' being put through the paces by a tyrannical drill sergeant. Where it surpasses Kubrick's vision is its ability to translate the process of dehumanisation onto the battle field engagingly, albeit with a more contextual message.

Mendes's Jarheads are mere ordinance in a technological war. Trudging across the desert they encounter the burnt-out convoys hit by US laser-guided bombs, its victims anonymous, probably civillian. Their's is a modern war where the enemy is unclear, where the battle is won from the air, and their experience is defined by their never having shot their rifles. It deals with a generation of disenfranchised young men brought up to believe in American superiority but who never had to fight to achieve it. Many will leave unable to consider themselves a hero in a country obsessed by heroism, and some are left, finally, in despair at the seeming futility of it. Having been moulded into testosterone-fuelled, unthinking (hence 'Jarhead'), killing-machines, the war for many of them is one of boredom and frustration.

Where the film is really elevated is in its highly stylised vision of the desert, unrelentingly oppressive in stark, unflinching white. Its use of contemporaneous music is also clever, even if one character comments that they don't even have music to define their age in the same way that Vietnam did. Nirvana's 'Something in the Way' accompanies a terrifying dream sequence where Swofford goes to be sick in the mess hall sink, but unleashes a torrent of sand instead of vomit. Equally brilliant is the marines offloading their munitions into the sky to Public Enemy's 'Fight the Power' in an archly symbolic vision of end of the war celebrations. There are many entirely cinematic conceits such as Gyllenhaal's protagonist Anthony Swofford encountering a oil-covered horse in the mecadamised apocalypse of a sabotaged oilfield. This seemingly offers the bewildered Swofford an almost mythological dimension to his experience, but this is soon debased by a drunken party. Swofford often seems on the verge of some kind of epithany but is misguided by the sensless machismo of 'The Core'. This theme is best realised in the brutal irony of the scene where the marines are shown patriotically chanting to Apocalypse Now's famed Ride of the Valkaries helicopter assault, apparently unaware of its subversive connotations and highly seduced by the spectacle of American military might ('Shock and Awe').