Clint Eastwood's 'American Sniper' Isn't Pro-War Propaganda

Contrary to what many critics would have you think.

I published this review—which doubles as a bit of media criticism—back in 2015 and I republish it now both because I enjoyed writing it at the time and am proud of the results, and because it’s illustrative of a trend that was only just taking shape six years ago, but has come into full swing after several years of Trump, many months of COVID-19 lockdowns and the rise of a new brand of leftist thinking we refer to, largely for convenience, as woke; as well as the rise of an even more vocal rightwing identity politics we may as well call Trumpism.

Criticism of art—in particular political art such as war films or biopics—should contain some degree of political awareness and there’s nothing at all wrong with bringing some of your own politics to bear when it comes to reviewing a movie like American Sniper. However, criticism—much like art itself—fails when it becomes explicitly political; when its politics overshadow its deeper thematic study of the human condition art becomes trite; when criticism focuses more on the politics of a work rather than its quality, criticism fails. American Sniper, as I argue in the piece below, while a political film, is not one that pushes a political agenda. Yet a healthy portion of its critics—on the left and the right—either denounce or embrace it as a pro-war paean. They are wrong to do so and I am, naturally, right to call them out on it.

Enjoy.

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Much ado has been made of American Sniper, Clint Eastwood's Iraq War biopic about America's deadliest sniper, Chris Kyle, played by Bradley Cooper.

(Beware of spoilers.)

As the Washington Free Beacon's Sonny Bunch notes (with a heavy sigh) "American Sniper has devolved from a well-reviewed, Oscar-nominated film into the frontline of said war, with lefty outlets slamming its failure to apologize for American “misdeeds” in Iraq and righty outlets crowing about the picture’s success and praising it for showing a side of military life that Hollywood doesn’t usually go in for. The fault lines here are all terribly predictable."

Take Amanda Taub of Vox, who goes on at painful length about the horrors of the film, which she likens to a pro-war recruitment film. In Eastwood's film, she complains, there is no room for anything but good vs evil, where Americans are "good" and the Muslim world "evil."

American Sniper "feeds the narrative that the civilized world is at war with Muslims, that the only solution is to respond with crushing violence, and that people who refuse to believe that are naïfs" she writes.

"That's its own form of dangerous extremism. Its premises are wrong, and its results are dangerous. By feeding that narrative, American Sniper is part of the problem."

Taub must have missed the scenes where a broken-up relative reads a letter from a dead Navy Seal questioning the validity of the Iraq War. Or the heart-breaking glimpse at wounded veterans.

Vox's Zack Beauchamp actually mentions some of the scenes that challenge Kyle's perspective, including a moment when his brother tells him "fuck this place" much to Kyle's surprise and bafflement, but still misses how these scenes might indicate that while the film is told from Kyle's point of view, it isn't trying to simply paint that view as the only valid one.

Beauchamp argues that "viewers of American Sniper are given a highly political re-telling of the Iraq War — and one that so wildly misrepresents the truth of the war that it is practically tantamount to whitewashing history." I disagree. As an opponent of the Iraq war, even I find this interpretation biased and unfair.

Many on the left argue that the film white-washes the Iraq War, that it doesn't do enough to show the "true" reasons we invaded that country, or that it makes it seem like a direct response to 9/11 and Al-qaeda. What they fail to understand, or what they choose to ignore in order to score political points, is that this is a film told from a very specific perspective---that of a soldier on the ground, who believes it is his patriotic duty to protect his country and fellow soldiers.

Kyle isn't interested at all in the politics. He's so gung-ho in his conviction he very nearly destroys his marriage. He's also very nearly overwhelmed by PTSD, until he finds a new purpose after the war in assisting other veterans. This is a film that doesn't bother much with the big-picture stuff. It zeroes in one one man, one soldier, and his struggles.

And for all the time it spends making Kyle an admirable and heroic figure, it also shows his flaws---stubbornness, a lack of thoughtfulness about the war (that other soldiers display) and, as the war gets to him more and more, outbursts of anger and paranoia.

At Breitbart, John Nolte is perhaps a little less breathless in his praise of American Sniper as validation of the war on terror and confirmation that the Americans are the "good guys."

"War is ugly and it’s not pretty watching our guys kick in doors," he writes. "But there are bad guys behind those doors, and no matter how bad those guys might be, Eastwood makes sure the audience knows Americans don’t carry power drills or take lives out of any motive other than self-defense.

"There is nothing even close to moral equivalence in “America Sniper,” only the truth: that there is no equivalence between the barbarians who target the innocent and the American heroes who target those who target the innocent."

And so on and so forth, everywhere you turn, American Sniper is being held up as the great (or most terrible) Pro-War movie of the decade, of the century, of all time....

Don't listen to any of it. American Sniper isn't about validating the war on terror any more than it's about recruiting soldiers. It's the story of one man told from his perspective and the perspective of those who shared his experiences. It portrays an ugly and frightening war from the perspective of someone who believed deeply that what he was doing there was just and right. Whether you think the Iraq war was just and right is another question entirely and one that this film only brushes up against, but never faces head on. There are other films that tackle that question. American Sniper is not one of them.

There are also better reviews. Read Ed Morrisey's sober take on the film over at Hot Air. Forbes critic Mark Hughes who notes that the "film’s politics aren’t quite as clear-cut as a lot of critics and viewers seem to think."

Hughes continues, "Eastwood himself isn’t — contrary to apparent popular belief — highly enthusiastic about the U.S. war in Iraq, and nor did he approach Chris Kyle’s story with a simplistic jingoism or patriotism that unfortunately has been wrongly attributed to the film."

Indeed, Eastwood has made that clear in interviews about the film.

American Sniper "certainly has nothing to do with any [political] parties or anything," the director told the Toronto Star. "These fellows who are professional soldiers, Navy personnel or what have you, go in for a certain reason ... and there's no political aspect there other than the fact that a lot of things happen in war zones."

Bradley Cooper, the show's star and producer, told Huffington Post that "For me, and for Clint, this movie was always a character study about what the plight is for a soldier."

And this is what American Sniper, ultimately, is about. In the end, it's not about whether Iraq was justified or not. It isn't about our foreign policy at all.

Isn't war always hell? Even the so-called "good" wars like World War II were hell.

And when they're over, the troops come home and many of them are broken mentally and physically and countless times throughout this country's history we have failed to properly care for them.

"If it’s not this movie, I hope to god another movie will come out where it will shed light on the fact of what servicemen and women have to go through, and that we need to pay attention to our vets," Cooper told the Huffington Post. "It doesn’t go any farther than that. It’s not a political discussion about war, even…It’s a discussion about the reality. And the reality is that people are coming home, and we have to take care of them.”

American Sniper is a film about soldiers. It's told from a soldier's perspective. Kyle is fighting what he sees as the good fight. He witnesses horrible atrocities committed by the enemies, but that doesn't mean the film is white-washing any of America's own mistakes away. It just isn't forcing those things into a film where they have no place. We are clearly shown the toll this takes on Kyle---not because he questions his job or thinks he shouldn't kill the enemy, but because even for someone like him war can you tear you apart.

It's not a perfect film. The enemy sniper is too perfect as the antagonist, too much the Yin to Kyle's Yang. The Butcher is a cartoon villain (though the torture scene was stomach-churning and hardly cartoonish.) I wish the movie spent a little more time with Kyle after the war instead of ending so abruptly.

But by and large, as a character study and a glimpse at what soldiers go through during and after a war, this is Eastwood at his finest. And Bradley Cooper is nothing less than outstanding as Chris Kyle.

I was (and remain) a critic of our foreign policy in the Middle East. I was highly skeptical of our reasons for invading Iraq and believe much of that war and our withdrawal from Iraq was horribly botched. But I didn't come out of American Sniper thinking this was some elaborate justification for that cause. The only reason that occurred to me at all while watching were the numerous articles praising or damning the film for its politics.

Indeed, American Sniper is so controversial now that some writers are discussing it without even watching the movie first. Forget art criticism, scoring political points is the ultimate gravy.

Nor is it the first big movie to portray a controversial war without delving into its controversy. Even a critical darling like Forrest Gump portrays Vietnam in a fairly apolitical way. Forrest is there simply to protect his friends, which he does valiantly. After the war, he's not interested in being a mouthpiece for the protesters, who are hardly portrayed as heroes themselves. And in both films, we glimpse a bit of the struggle veterans go through---that becoming more of a politically charged focal point than the wars themselves. Yet Forrest Gump was not roundly criticized as pro-war propaganda.

Ultimately, our interpretation of a film can and will vary from one person to the next. Whether the director or writer intended something only matters to a degree. Eastwood may not have intended American Sniper to be a pro-war flick, but that doesn't preclude viewers from seeing it that way. The problem I see is the politicization of criticism. Rather than view the movie on its own merits, many are using it as a tool to further their own political causes---or to signal their approval/disapproval of certain politics to their chosen tribe.

But good art transcends politics. We can, or should be able to view even a film that has truly hideous politics as a great work of art. This is likely why so many great filmmakers include Birth of a Nation in their most-influential-movies list. The 1915 masterpiece is easily one of the most important films of all time despite its glorification of the KKK.

This isn't to say that politics have no place in art criticism. It would be unfair to review Birth of a Nation only on its technical achievements and avoid mention of its deep-seated racism, for instance. But there needs to be a balance. It's traditionally been the right that's most viciously crucified film and games and other entertainment media for violence and sex and so forth. But that tendency is increasingly common on the left now as well, though not always over the exact same issues.

Unless we want all of our art to be morality plays or to only ever view art that confirms our own biases, we need to be able to look past our political disagreements and judge art based on its quality. I don't believe art has no impact on the world around us. Games, movies, books---these are powerful, transformative things that can and do influence people. But I don't believe they are dangerous. American Sniper is not a "dangerous" film, as many on the left suggest. It is a film about a soldier, and one that forces us to view war through a soldier's eyes.

To hear critics describe a film as "dangerous" strikes me as dangerous in and of itself. It's the first word on the lips of every censor in history.

In any case, the film ends shortly after Kyle's children ask to play with their father. The boy, much like my own son, asks Kyle to play Skylanders with him. Kyle says next time, and then walks away never to return. It's horrifically sad, to see this man return from war, return from the dead almost, only to be killed on American soil.

Ultimately, Kyle wasn't killed by an Iraqi or a terrorist. He wasn't killed in battle. He was killed trying to help other broken soldiers, shot not by an Iraqi, but by a mentally unstable American veteran. That anyone could walk away from this film imagining it to be a glorification of war is simply mind-boggling. Chris Kyle may have been a hero, and he may not have been, but he wouldn't have died the way he did if not for the Iraq War. That doesn't make it a subversive anti-war film either.

It just means it's a lot more complicated than our political punditry would like it to be.

This post was originally published at my Forbes blog and has been lightly edited. Thanks for reading! Watch American Sniper on Amazon.