Starts out bizarrely, a teacher and his wife are living the ultimate hippy lifestyle off the grid, maybe this is more prevalent than I've been exposed to, but for the movie, it just seems weird and pointless.
The news reports on them for a sensation piece presumably, but doesn't immediately follow up after his wife is killed..... odd.
It's a great motive for joining a military, but he simply doesn't fit in, and the training, if you want to call it that, is on par with kids playing, but with real guns.
There is literally 2 training scenes on the range, and we're off to fight the war.... except hero boy doesn't bother to listen to his commander, because he's got a good shot on 2 random fighters. Never mind that the commander knows why they're out there, looking for the enemy snipers, but nope, blown away because hero boy couldn't keep his round in his rifle.
Jump to our hero immediately somehow being the go to guy for sniping.... and now he's of course refilling his own ammunition and everything.....
So either the pacing of the movie is terrible, and a fair amount of time has passed without any indication of such, or it's just a terrible script.
I'm suspecting it's the latter, since randomly hero boy who didn't seem to get along with his 5 classmates (though he also didn't seem to not get along with them either, there was next to zero emotions showed either way). When two of them went on a mission, off screen and unbeknownst to the viewers, he starts asking about them multiple times, awkwardly. Only for one of them to be dead of course. But wait.... here comes more lack of any emotion...
It ended quite predictably, not a bad thing, but also not riveting.
For the life of me I cannot figure out why they were constantly loading their first round by hand, when the rifles were all magazine fed, unless it's for that one extra round of capacity, than that's fine, but other than that, it makes no sense to do it. I've served in the Canadian military and fired an assortment of weapons, semi auto, full auto, belt fed, mag fed. Never any sniper rifles, so maybe snipers do have a reason for it, just seems unlikely though, and that it was added by someone unfamiliar with weapons.
Oh and to say it's a political statement or propaganda movie, meh, almost every movie is to some extent, even children's cartoons, this one just happens to be a current issue one. It doesn't even detract from the movie.
