Jarhead

William Broyles Jr. wrote the screenplay. He enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1968, commanded an infantry platoon in Vietnam, founded Texas Monthly on his return, and had already written Apollo 13 and Cast Away before adapting Anthony Swofford’s memoir. Sam Mendes’s film was cut by Walter Murch, one of its three re-recording mixers, working in Final Cut Pro. The connection worth knowing: the helicopter attack the marines screen to work themselves up is the Ride of the Valkyries sequence from Apocalypse Now, and Murch built that film’s sound years earlier. Roughly 25 years on he recut the same footage, this time as material meant to stir soldiers rather than appal a viewer. Murch calls it a war without significant ground combat. Some night material around the burning Kuwaiti wells was built on Universal sound stages, with lighting doing the work of the flames. The desert shoot spread from the Imperial Valley dunes into Mexico. At the 2006 Academy Awards the film appears in no category at all. A good fit if you want the Apocalypse Now attack turned into a recruitment reel inside the movie, and can sit with a war film whose climax is the shot not taken. Not for anyone expecting the Gulf War to be explained; the telling never leaves one man’s boredom.