I am really fond of Clint Eastwood, which is why I was determined to go with an open mind to see his controversial movie "American Sniper." But despite my best efforts, I came away disappointed by this crude propaganda movie - even calling it a movie might do an injustice to the advertising sector. The film opens with a cliche: the sound of the Muslim call to prayer drifting over a ravaged Arab city, through which we comprehend the setting as the Middle East, and its image that is channeled into our consciousness as a Western audience is reinforced. The scene implies: "This is not the U.S. nor Europe. This is not a country where Western and civilized people live. So keep this fact in mind while watching the chain of events."
Eastwood's "American Sniper" is based on the true life story of Chris Kyle, an elite sniper in the U.S. Army. In the first scenes, Chris has to make a tough decision. He notices a woman wearing a burqa walking toward several American soldiers. She has a little child with her. She pulls out a Russian-made grenade from her burqa and gives it to the child. The child runs quickly away from his mother and toward the soldiers. Chris has to make a decision. He is sure that what he sees is a grenade, but he must be careful as he is about to blow a child's brains out.
He kills the child. The mother runs toward the child. We see the whole scene from the perspective of Chris's high-tech rifle's aiming-sight. What he sees after this is astonishing. Instead of kneeling down at her child's body, she starts to run toward the soldiers to complete the unfulfilled task. A subliminal message underlies this scene, which says that the woman is such an irrational and sub-human being that she has no problem in sacrificing her child and does not even care about his death. When the woman is killed, the audience heaves a sigh of relief. What is necessary is done, the person who must be killed is dead.
The story moves on to the main plot, which is Chris's chase of Zarkavi, an al-Qaida leader. At the same time, Mustafa, the shooting champion of the Iraq Olympic team, tracks Chris. The name Chris obviously represents Jesus Christ, while Mustafa is the other name of Prophet Muhammad. Afterwards, a cutthroat fight starts between these two snipers and Eastwood represents it as a competition between the two prophets. Many dichotomies stand out during the movie: Christianity vs. Islam, Christ vs. Muhammad, good vs. evil, et cetera.
Despite being a sniper, Chris is portrayed as a male version of Mother Teresa - a kind-hearted husband and father; Mustafa is represented as a cold-blooded, dehumanized and brainwashed killing machine. They both kill people, but the audience knows that the bullets from Chris's rifle bring healing, while Mustafa's bullets inflict death.
In another scene, Chris shoots an Iraqi barbarian while he is about to shoot innocent U.S. soldiers with an RPG. But a child tries to pick up the RPG and attempts to complete the task. Chris prays that he does not have to kill the child, sweating blood. When the child drops the RPG and runs away, he breathes a sigh of relief, and even cries. This situation summarizes how Americans feel when their country was in Iraq. "We are killing, but do you know why we are killing?"
Eventually, Chris and Mustafa come up against each other. Chris kills Mustafa, which means that Prophet Muhammad and the civilization he represents are defeated. And Chris is killed on his way to the U.S. by a war veteran fighting in Iraq. With their false claims of weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein's alleged aid to al-Qaida, they led to their death 1 million civilians, and gave rise to sectarian conflicts and the emergence of barbaric groups like the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) under the name of the "liberation movement of Iraq." Hollywood and the U.S. media play an enormous role in bringing about this chain of events by exploiting what is sacred, hiding the truth and doing it all very professionally.
