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I went to see Jarhead (Sam Mendes) on opening night, and I loved it. Its main character is a 20 year old named Swoff (Jake Gyllenhaal) who, for reasons beyond even his own comprehension, signs up for the Marines and is one of the first groups of Jarheads to arrive in the Middle East for Operation Desert Shield (which we all know soon becomes Operation Desert Storm). It is based on Anthony Swofford’s memoir of the same name.

Swoft and his comrades, including his spotter, Troy (Peter Sarsgaard), are a bunch of young men who are in many ways average your average group of guys. Swoft is the sensitive intellectual, surrounded by some of the typical characters needed to round out a group: the joker, the intense guy, the dumb guy, etc. We watch them train relentlessly and then, with mixed emotions, get shipped overseas. There, they do a lot of nothing. Well, they train a lot, but it seems that their presence there is not justified by any actual action. This fact has obvious effects on them, as they question even more the reasons why they are there – not just physically in the desert, but why they joined the Marines in the first place. Jamie Foxx plays their die-hard Staff Sergeant, who acts as both a personal mentor and their stoic leader.

I loved the way that the film communicated the conflicts existing within Swoft’s psyche. Despite his mandate as a Marine, he feels directionless and is bombarded with an array of triggers that only contribute to his confusion: the vast emptiness of the desert, letters from his girlfriend (whose faithfulness he obsessively questions), varying degrees of camaraderie, hours of nothingness and an inexplicable desire to actually interact with “the enemy”. There is a scene where he is being interviewed, and asked why he is serving. After skirting the question a couple of times, he finally answers, “I’m 20 years old, and I was dumb enough to sign a contract.”

In what I believe to be the most important scene of the film, Swoft and Troy are on an assignment to snipe an enemy tower. They are both scared and excited, and both for the same reason: they finally get to fire their weapons at an enemy. The way I interpreted their excitement was because this could possibly justify their lives of the previous few months; it was an end to the means. They needed to feel like their presence there had a purpose. When their mission is suddenly aborted, Troy freaks out and desperately pleads and begs to allow Swoft to take the shot, as if it is a sort of payback for the psychological and emotional torture they had been enduring, rather than a real desire to fire at an enemy.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s acting is superb. He portrays all of his character’s conflicting moods with convincing sincerity: it was like truly seeing a person in three dimensions.

Every aspect of filmmaking is used in true form here to effectively tell this story. It’s an action movie with no action, a comedy with no jokes and a drama with no heart. You don’t feel for the characters because you especially like them; rather, you see the emptiness that this experience has imposed upon them and you find yourself trying to feel for them. It is a statement about how war can and will permanently scar you. The epilogue was hardly soothing and the film ends with no conclusion; perhaps this is how Swoft and his friends felt after returning from months of nothing.