Posts Tagged "war"

For historical content, this book is strong, and it effectively forms a man-on-the-ground narrative from the battles of the Chosin Reservoir campaign of the Korean War. But considered purely on writing quality, it's only decent. For instance, the author has a strange and persistent love of comma-splicing clauses that are nowhere near full sentences. I can accept it as a stylistic quirk, but it makes for uneven reading.

First Hemingway I’ve read in a good long while. The stereotype is that he writes lots of short sentences, but I don’t think that’s true. He likes writes a lot of direct descriptive sentences, but also goes hog wild joining them together into the long run on that are expressive in the way poetry is: dense with imagery, occasionally wandering into philosophical speculation.

I was holding out hope that the ending would not be sad, but it was, and abruptly, viciously so.

I felt a little disappointed that the main plot was ultimately all in Paul Berlin's imagination. Yet there were clues throughout the book, such as in Paul's thoughts to himself while in the observation post, that the soldiers had successfully returned from their search for Cacciato. So I knew ahead of time that in some way they had to have "returned" to Vietnam. I guess I was just holding out hope that all the fantastic events of the book would have really happened.

A war movie where the characters never shoot their guns, except at the sky in the penultimate scene? You'd think that's crazy, but it works: Jarhead is a war movie, but it's not about fighting. It's about all the other things that make up a war -- logistics, boredom, stress, discipline, terror -- and what happens to you when all those irresistible forces roll over you and lay you flat.

My favorite scene is the one where the soldiers struggle through the desert against a blacked-out sky, the only light thrown by pillars of flame from burning oil wells as liquid crude rains from the sky and turns the world to ink.

The process of training the titular "dirty dozen" into uncouth, unorthodox, but dependable soldiers would be a mere montage in a lesser movie. Here it's half the running time or more. As the soldiers interact with each other, rebel against discipline and take justice into their own hands, I am reminded of The Wages of Fear, which benefits from spending thirty minutes dwelling on the characteristics and attitudes of ordinary men who, in an utterly naturalistic way, become extraordinary.

I watched this as part of my "curriculum" for movies featuring intrigue. Although I've given this a star rating, as with previous entries this is less a review and more an analysis of character interactions to improve my D&D Dungeon Mastering skills.

The idea of watching movies to study intrigue was inspired by this Tao of D&D post, and subsequent discussion on Alexis Smolensk's Patreon. As always, if you care about the cutting edge of roleplaying games, you need to read Alexis's blog. Once you see how much you can learn from the millions of words he's given away for free, you'll understand why I send him some cold hard cash each month to get just a little extra.