The Gulf War through the eyes of Marine Pfc Anthony Swofford (a somewhat desensitized Jake Gyllenhaal), on whose memoir the script is based. Fundamentally this is a lot of old stuff made over for a new war, a new era, a new age in filmmaking. Which means, whatever else it means, a bleached-out image, long before we're under the desert sun; a compact disc's worth of golden oldies; a crutchlike dependence on first-person voice-over; a surplus of four-letter words; a bluntness in the depiction of piss, shit, puke; a nose-rubbing focus on the physical, the palpable, and a blindness to what we might blushingly call the spiritual; a spotlight, taking its cue from the recreational screening of Apocalypse Now at Camp Pendleton, on the absurdity, the futility, the brutality, the insanity. (John Ford's alternative view of the military is "wrong" in the sense that a derby hat is "wrong," the fashion sense.) While the commitment to the material is never in question, while the effort is never less than intense, the details that might make the old seem fresh again are only occasional: the hard-ass drill instructor who compels the new enlistee to "blow" reveille without the aid of a trumpet, and then for an encore Stevie Wonder's "You Are the Sunshine of My Life"; or the Wall-of-Shame at the base of operations in Kuwait, a bulletin board of faithless wives and girlfriends, the Dear John correspondents, back home. Those sorts of details grow thicker the closer the movie gets to the front line: the horrific tableau of charred bodies and vehicles frozen in flight; the black rain; the oil-slicked stray horse; the plumes of flame from the burning wells. In the final tally it doesn't add up to much. With Peter Sarsgaard, Jamie Foxx, and Chris Cooper; directed by Sam Mendes. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd