The following article is a review of American Sniper, but it goes further in-depth than most of the reviews on this site. Because of this, I am posting this as a “Review” and a “Deep End” article. Due to the nature of the review, spoilers will be discussed.

First off, the good: American Sniper is a technical marvel. The film is the frontrunner in both sound categories at the Oscars this year, and it is obvious why. The way that the sound team layered the background noises in Iraq onto the “silent” moments while Chris Kyle is lining up shots gives everything a additional layer of realism and tension. Also well done is the way these background noises fade out momentarily between breaths and heartbeats prior to Kyle firing his gun. When Kyle returns to America, harmless noises like lawnmower engines and auto-repair work rise up in the sound mix to subtly indicate the way that he is always on edge. Combined with Bradley Cooper’s strong performance, the film is able to say a lot about Kyle’s mental state without throwing it all into the dialogue.

The editing plays into the film’s formal display of Chris Kyle’s psychology, as well. In the early sections of the film, plenty of time is spent showing Kyle’s decision to go back to Iraq, or his time on helicopters and planes as he’s brought back to the warzone. As the film goes on, it eliminates these transitional scenes, creating the sensation that both of Kyle’s lives are blurring together, becoming more and more difficult to differentiate from one another. It’s excellent work from Clint Eastwood and his editors, Joel Cox and Gary Roach.

The film is problematic, however, because it never seems to figure out what it means to say thematically. Much has been made in the media about how inaccurate American Sniper’s portrayal of the real Chris Kyle is, and how Eastwood’s personal politics may influence the film. I don’t really want to delve into these aspects, since they’re ultimately irrelevant to whether or not the film is any good or not, but perhaps Eastwood’s politics do influence the way American Sniper ends. It feels like Eastwood stumbled into an area that began to make him uncomfortable, so he backed off slowly and finished the film.

Let’s go back to the beginning. After a tense sequence in Iraq that ends with Kyle’s first kill, we get to see the man growing up. His father has a monologue about how all people are sheep, or wolves, or “aggressors.” As the analogy goes, the wolves prey on the sheep, and the aggressors step in to fight the wolves and protect the sheep. This analogy explains Kyle’s extraordinarily simplistic view of the world quite aptly. He’s a Texas boy who always wanted to be a cowboy, but when he saw footage of a terrorist attack on television, dog gone it, he just couldn’t let it slide. He had to drop everything and enlist in the SEALS program because America is the best country, these bad people wanted to hurt it, and he needed to stop them.

This is where the film begins to get confusing, thematically. For most of its run-time, American Sniper plays out like a cautionary tale of the horrors of war. Kyle kills many people, seemingly regrets some of his actions(while still believing they were for the greater good), and stops functioning as a husband, a father, and citizen. His war buddies often die, or obtain life-changing injuries. While he remains steadfast in his dedication to protecting America, many others around him, including his own brother, begin to lose faith in the war.

One scene in particular seems to indicate that the film at least considers the idea that the Iraq war, and Kyle’s efforts, were in vain. Kyle is attending one of his fellow Seals’s funeral, and the widow is reading a letter she received shortly before her husband was killed. In it, the man expresses doubt, and wishes he could just be home. When Kyle’s wife Taya mentions the letter again, Kyle suggests that it was the letter that killed his friend, as if his love for America could have stopped bullets. It’s a remarkably ignorant and insensitive sentiment, and shines a negative light on Kyle’s blind patriotism.

So, at this point the film seems to be a critique on the way that continued violence and tension can change somebody. This feels right at home in Eastwood’s oeuvre, and peaks when Kyle almost kills a dog at a barbecue for getting a bit rough. He goes to see a psychiatrist, who suggests that Kyle may not be as mentally sound as he believes he is, and recommends that he spend some time bonding with veterans at a Veteran’s Hospital.

This is where the movie falls apart for me. After two whole scenes of Kyle bonding with wounded veterans, he is seemingly cured. We jump to the day of his death, and his wife goes on and on about how wonderful he’s been as a husband and a father, which is completely contrary to anything we’ve seen in the film. It’s as if the movie is suggesting that PTSD is an easily treatable side effect of war, and it downplays all of the horrific things that have occurred to the people around Kyle.

The final nail in the coffin is in the way the film handle’s Kyle’s death, or more aptly, how it does not. In case you’re unaware, Chris Kyle was killed by another veteran who was suffering from PTSD. The fact that Kyle was killed by the results of the institution that he championed and was himself affected by seems to be , given the rest of the film, thematically integral. However, while we briefly see Kyle go outside to meet his killer, none of that is dramatized. We get a fade out, a quick text saying “Chris Kyle was killed that day by a veteran he was trying to help,” and then credits. The movie just stops in its tracks and starts showing us patriotic funeral footage.

There’s an article up at Time here that explains the reasoning for not showing Kyle’s death. It suggests that Eastwood backed off because he was concerned about Kyle’s children seeing their father die in the movie, and that they didn’t want to glorify his killer. I can respect that, but I still feel that this move severely hindered the picture. It’s a film that spends the majority of its runtime showing the psychological hazards of war, then completely undermines them in less than 10 minutes and cuts out the strongest example of those hazards in the narrative.

The way that the film ends now, with the funeral footage and a completely silent (and very awkward) credits sequence, reframes the movie as a tribute to a fallen hero, a man that we should all aspire to be. It may feed into the patriotic rush that has earned the film over $300 million to date, but it ignores the complexity of the film in favor of simplicity. Chris Kyle would have loved it.