Movies of all shapes and sizes are bound to explore an issue as controversial as the Iraq war. While many are going to be mindless action flicks and gory stories of war, some are going to be profound trips into the human psyche. "Stop-Loss" is of the latter variety, a meaningful, albeit chaotic, imagining of the soldier's tragedy and the country's moral vortex.
An unabashedly left-leaning, anti-war film, "Stop-Loss" stars Ryan Phillippe as Staff Sgt. Brandon King. King comes home to his small Texas town after having served two terms in Afghanistan and Iraq and is accompanied by childhood friends and fellow servicemen Tommy Burgess and Steve Shriver (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Channing Tatum, respectively). King is excited to get out of the Army and on with the rest of his life. However, his hopes are soon dashed when he finds himself subjected to stop-loss, a U.S. military policy that forces soldiers to serve past their original discharge date.
Angry, confused and completely fed up with war, King exemplifies one of the film's resounding themes when he tells his commanding officer, "Fuck the president." The confused protagonist finds himself on a physical and mental journey across the landscape of the United States and of his soul. While at times graphic and unnecessarily violent, the journey is a vivid and powerful exploration of the soldier's dilemma, the heartache and turmoil of war and post-traumatic stress disorder, from which nearly every character seems to suffer. The trauma appears to be the true focus of the film. The practice of stop-loss is merely a tool to initiate the plot. It is criticized but never fully explored.
Meaningful as it is, "Stop-Loss," at times, overdoes it. With the exception of King, every soldier, in addition to being emotionally and physically scarred, appears dedicated to "killing hajji." All sport tattoos, and amble through the script in a strange and barely linear pattern of self-destruction. Perhaps designed to be so, the plot itself is of a similar nature: nonsensical and fractured. While the meaning and message are more than clear, the ultimate conclusion to the story seems hollow.
It is, however, more than possible that Director Kimberly Peirce deliberately oversaw a plot that looped back on itself and left an unsatisfying story. The story does, after all, take a backseat to the human tragedy it explores. The full extent of what war can and has done to the soldiers who fight it - physically and mentally - is explored with wonderful performances. None of the characters appear to be fully in control of themselves or their surroundings and are little more than branches floating with a powerful current they barely understand.
The action of "Stop-Loss" is a brutal abstraction. Used mostly to hammer in the horrific psychology of war, it is far too gritty and much too short to be confused with a garden-variety war flick. Instead, it seems aimed at horrifying the audience as much as possible so that they might empathize with the characters, visceral marks on the skin and spirit that never fade and are never treated.
For a profound but sometimes overdone story of the psychological casualties of war, "Stop-Loss" hits theaters Friday.
