Like I said, I’m sure that Chris Kyle was a great and and effective fighter but the movie was atrocious. The pacing is erratic, the military tactics were ridiculous ( people bunching up, loud yelling when approaching concealed enemy positions, very poor fire discipline, and my favorite, Chris Kyle chatting away with his wife on a Satphone in the middle of firefights) Everybody just rattled away all their ammo without aiming (after all, it’s just blanks) and almost nobody seemed to aim. Lesson 1. If your enemy is stupid enough to run at you in the open, kill them. Cranking away at full auto sounds great but all you do is make noise.
I’ll add this to my list of totally unrealistic and unwatchable war movies.
You’d think that the director could have found at least one unemplyed Iraq vet that could’ve made things a bit more accurate
Never mind, I see you have already answered.
What do you say, Hulka? Was this type of thing claimed in the book?
You have some points of disagreement with the way the actors and director portrayed the weapons scenes, which may be quite accurate objections. However, your words "totally" and "unwatchable" are extreme and absolute. For those of us with less experience in weaponry, there was still much to learn from the film.
I was struck by the two scenes of the children handling weapons, the woman and child approaching the squad with a weapon hidden in her hijab, the scenes inside the home where a meal was served and then a weapons cache was discovered, the outdoor scenes showing both the countryside and the towns with satellite dishes all over the primitive houses, the uniforms and equipment in general, the scenes in hospital with the wounded, his interaction with the wounded, and many other things, including the news footage of Chris Kyle's actual funeral procession and funeral in a stadium in Texas. My experiences with combat wounded as a volunteer at Walter Reed were well represented in the film.
It's good to take movies with a grain of salt, or even a bag of salt, but overall, the film was not so distorted as to mis-portray the main gist of the story.
Like Lone Survivor. Used Marcus and some of his buddies. Hollywood can't always be 100% correct, got to have some embellishments for theatrical reasons.
Kind of like fighter pilots, when we watch a movie like, say, Top Gun, it drives us nuts for many of the same reasons you find land combat movies intolerable.