"All wars are different. All wars are the same. Mine lasted four days, four hours and one minute." says Swofford, the jarhead. Desert Storm itself was such a joke that most of the army wasn't needed. All the U.N. needed were planes, which shot the hell out of Saddam's troops before the troops could get there. In fact, you don't see any real combat in this movie. Just bomb drops in the distance. The closest Swofford comes to getting hurt is friendly fire. That was the gulf war. That's all it was. Just a lot of hanging out in the desert, four days of nervousness, then everyone went home.
This movie captures it perfectly, and the reason that this is just a good war film and not a great one, has more to do with the not-so-great war, then the film. I have to mention Roger Deaken's, the director of photography for this film. At times he creates the illusion that the soldier's are occupying works of art, not Iraq. Of great beauty are the oil fires, caused by Saddam. They blaze with glory in the Arabian sun, and I was awed by the magnificence of the hell imposed by them. A perfect backdrop of the movie and the war itself. I think what we all remember from Desert Storm more than anything else were those great plumes of Fire out in the middle of the nothingness of the Arabian desert. That's how this war was different.
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