Drill Sargent - Why the fuck are you here marine?
Marine Recruit - Sir, I got lost on the way to college sir!

I have no personal experience to evaluate how close what I saw in Jarhead maps to reality. But my estimation is it's pretty close (others have said the same thing as well.) This is the story of a guy who joins up with the marines after high school and ends up as one of the first soldiers on the ground in Saudi Arabia for the first Iraq war.

Every war movie tends to have a theme or a message. They just can't really get away from it. Black Hawk Down was about how to the soldiers on the ground politics or the reason for the fighting is unimportant, all that matters is the guy standing next to you. Saving Private Ryan was about the strange choices we make in strategizing for war, and not all soldiers have the same intrinsic strategic value (in that case, Private Ryan was viewed as being more important to the military then the other soldiers lost in the parachute drops or the soldiers in the squad sent to fetch him.) Jarhead is about hurry up and wait.

That's a classic term in the military. Everyone busts their ass to be ready to go, and in their place, then just hangs out waiting for the right time. In this case, they busted their asses in training, were ready to go, got shipped out to Saudi Arabia, and then cruised around the desert for months being bored out of their minds. This movie is about that boring time.

Now, one would think it probably isn't the best idea to make a movie about a bunch of people being bored - it would probably end up being kind of a boring movie. Jarhead only has this problem a little bit. It focuses on how the guys passed the time, and didn't linger on things too long. It skipped through months of time quickly, stopping to take peeks into how the characters are doing. The good part of this is, as we would expect, a bunch of guys bored out of their minds in the desert come up with some humorous ways to entertain themselves - so it's a funny thing to watch.

But the real achievement of this movie is how is translates that feeling of boredom without actually being boring. I'm not sure how they did it, but I'm impressed. I guess that's just the sign of good film makers.

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