By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
If you had to guess the top-grossing film in the United States for 2014, Captain America: The Winter Soldier would be a good guess, except that it was only number four; Guardians of the Galaxy was number three. A major franchise film, The Hunger Games – Mockingjay Part One was two, and all of those blockbusters lost out to the top-grossing domestic film of the year, American Sniper. The Oscar-winning war movie from Clint Eastwood and Bradley Cooper pulled in $350 million domestically, nearly $100 million more than Winter Soldier, and now it’s been in Netflix’s top ten since it joined the streaming service.
American Sniper Is A Trueish Story
American Sniper adapts the biography of the controversial war hero Chris Kyle, played by Bradley Cooper, was a NAVY SEAL Sniper with 160 confirmed kills to his name, including a shot of 2,100 yards, one of the longest confirmed kills in world history. The film runs through Kyle’s life, from when he entered the armed services to when he met his wife, Taya (Sienna Miller), and then his multiple tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Eastwood isn’t interested in covering the high-level reasoning for the wars; instead, he’s focused on the life of Kyle and the impact that the war had on him.
Chris Kyle was not a perfect man, and in fact, officials widely discredited his stories bragging about killing men stateside, and he was not a perfect husband, American Sniper, though it lionizes his legend, at least pays lip service to the dark side of living as a soldier. In the film’s back half, between tours of duty and missions to hunt down Al-Qaeda leaders, we see Kyle struggle through his PTSD and the difficulty he has in civilian life. That and, of course, the worst animatronic baby in movie history.
American Sniper Blew Away Hollywood
Though American Sniper ends on a tragic note, Clint Eastwood’s gamble paid off, not only by securing a box office record, but with six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor. The film only won for Best Sound Editing, but Eastwood was awarded Best Director from the National Film Board of Review, while Bradley Cooper won Best Male Actor at the MTV Movie Awards. Controversy surrounded the film during awards season, however, with critics saying it went too far to depict Chris Kyle as a hero, while Cooper himself said it’s about soldiers being forced to make impossible decisions by careless bureaucrats and leaders who put them in harm’s way.
No matter how you choose to view the movie, American Sniper was a success, and its enduring popularity over a decade later is a testament to the perfect combination of Eastwood and Cooper. Today, the film has a 72 percent fresh rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, alongside an 84 percent audience rating, and as proof, wherever the film is available for streaming, it’ll be near the top of the chart. Modern war movies have been hit or miss, and the decades-long War on Terror has been a tough nut for studios to crack, which makes Eastwood’s war drama stand out even more as the years go by, and nothing can surpass it.
American Sniper is now streaming on Netflix.
