Sam Mendes’s “Jarhead” makes no immediate attempt to connect you to its central character. It makes no attempt to pump emotion and empathy into the veins of the audience. It falls in line with Mendes’ penchant for colder, more removed depictions, and it’s potentially the material that most suits this penchant that the director has come across to date.
I don’t blame the film for any of this. In fact, I rather champion it for it. The thematics come across, even if Mendes doesn’t follow through when he could have REALLY hit it out of the park, but the overall sense one gets from the film is a mish-mash of the offerings we’ve seen from other war film directors.
Following a protagonist reminiscent of Albert Camus’ central focus in “The Stranger,” Bill Broyles’s screenplay (based on the novel by Anthony Swofford) gets to the point abruptly and hammers it home for the remainder.
In the eyes of a “jarhead,” as envisioned by Swofford, life is a meaningless existence. The journey of a soldier is less about defending a nation than it is about defining himself (or herself). In the middle of the desert, miles away from anything that matters in their world, no matter what they’re told by those in positions of power, the lives of freedom fighters are worthless in the eyes of those who live them.