American Sniper
Director: Clint Eastwood Year: 2014 Resonance Rating: 3.5 ripples (out of 5) American Sniper opens with an awful moral choice: Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) is a Navy Seal and sniper covering his fellow troops from a rooftop in a war-torn, rubble-pile of a city in Iraq. He spots a woman and a young boy walking out of a building. They shouldn’t be there but they’re not necessarily doing anything wrong - yet. He sees the woman hand the boy a high-powered grenade. He sets the boy in his site and places his finger on the trigger. His partner warns him that he’ll be “fried at Leavenworth” if he’s wrong. He asks for visual confirmation on the ground or alternate viewpoints. No one can confirm. If he doesn’t pull the trigger and the boy is there to kill, he will watch perhaps dozens of his fellow troops die. What will he do? The film almost begs: what would you do? The film is, in its entirety, about difficult choices regard roles in society, particularly as they pertain to “good ...