In the final scene of American Sniper, having survived four tours in Iraq and apparently mostly recovered from PTSD, Chris Kyle is at home and sneaks up on his wife, holding a revolver. As he playfully shushes his kids not to give him away, he cocks the gun and points it at his wife, who laughs. After some dialog, he places the gun, still cocked, on a high shelf and leaves the house.
I know relatively little about guns, but WTF?
I didn’t know about Chris Kyle, or what happened to him in real life, so my reaction to this scene was fear that he was about to accidentally shoot his wife. I couldn’t believe that he, of all people, be so reckless with a weapon around his wife and small children, both in pointing it, cocked, at his wife, and then leaving it out, still cocked, when he left the house.
My gun questions: Was it clearly and obviously a toy or fake gun? It looked pretty real to me. If it’s real, wasn’t his behavior a complete violation of everything people are taught about handling weapons? Why would he do that? Was he just so confident around weapons that he couldn’t imagine an accident happening?
My drama questions: If it was a fake gun, was this scene just supposed to be a light-hearted family scene before he meets his fate? If it was a real gun, what is the scene intended to convey? Is it supposed to build a sense of foreboding about what happens next? Is it a parallel to the risk he was taking in trying to help other returning vets?
It was a real gun and that scene bothered me too. I also found it curious that it didn’t bother his wife a bit and she apparently found having a cocked revolver pointed at her rather charming. My guess is that it’s supposed to convey to the audience that Chris is okay now and even his wife would know immediately that him handling a gun like that is nothing to be worried about. He’s a pro and he’s fine. So what happens to him next is all because of someone else and not anything to do with his PTSD issues or the mental state he’d been in earlier.
^ Sure, but one of the first rules of gun safety is that you treat all guns as if they’re loaded and never point them at someone you don’t intend to shoot, especially with your finger inside the trigger guard as his was in that scene. Guns aren’t toys.
That scene bothered me too. You are never supposed to point a real gun at anyone, whether or not you know it’s loaded, and I was surprised someone like Kyle wouldn’t know that. I couldn’t tell if it was just a filmmaker fuckup, or if it was supposed to mean something about his mindset that day.
Thanks, all. Maybe the scene is supposed to show that he was getting careless, both with the pistol and with the damaged vets he was trying to help. Although that would imply that most or many returning vets are dangerous “loaded weapons,” capable of going off at any time, a suggestion many would deny or find offensive.
I don’t own any firearms, and have only fired a couple on one visit to a range, but all the people I’ve known who own guns, and most of the gun-owners here, have always been very serious about weapon handling. They always stress the rule of never assuming that a weapon is unloaded, and never pointing it at anything you don’t intend to destroy. So it seemed completely wrong for someone as experienced as Kyle to be so reckless in that scene.
I do not mean to say that if the gun wasn’t loaded that the behavior was ok. Just that I assume he was not playing around like that with a gun he knew to be loaded. And that the kids and wife also believed it to be unloaded.
Again, even if true you still shouldn’t do that and if your spouse is doing it they shouldn’t be ok with it. But that doesn’t mean people don’t and aren’t. People are often stupid.
But unless it was something described in the book I’m not sure what the intent was in putting it in the movie.
I’ve just seen the movie and was also disturbed by that scene. As a non-American I was left wondering if I lacked the cultural context to make sense of it. Was that normal gun behavior in an American household (despite the well known gun rules)? Or was it otherwise meaningful? I also didn’t know Chris Kyle’s story so was expecting some horrible accident. I guess others found it strange too though.
There are always yahoos that point guns at friends and family. But I suspect the vast majority of gun-owners don’t. I have guns and am very familiar with them; but I don’t even like realistic toy guns pointed at me.
Eddie Ray Routh was recently convicted of murder in Texas–for killing Chris Kyle. Routh never denied the crime but his lawyer was going for an insanity plea. Didn’t work–he got life in prison without parole.
Perhaps a firing range was not the best place to counsel a troubled vet…
I agree with what X-ray vision was angling towards. In true Hollywood fashion, the director showed in the span of a minute that Chris Kyle, his wife and children had regained an immaculate, trusting relationship.
Totally bothered me and I can’t envision any professional military person ever doing that -I hope it was just artistic license.
I just watched that movie on the weekend and came here to post about that scene and see what other people, especially Americans, had to say about it.
As a Canadian who has only handled a firearm in very safe situations, even I know that you never, ever point a weapon at a living being unless you plan to kill it. I kept looking at the gun in the movie for an orange tip indicating that it was a toy but nope, it looked real. I actually thought the story was going to be that his son took the gun down from the fridge and killed his sister or something. (This was before I knew that the real Chris Kyle had been murdered - I asked my husband why the wife was looking out the door with such a strange look her face when Kyle drove off with that veteran, he said it’s because she knows something is off with that guy.)
I thought the movie was excellent but that scene skeeved me right out.
I knew Chris Kyle tangentially (not close friends or anything) and I was stunned by that scene because I don’t think anyone that experienced and highly trained would do that, and in particular I don’t think Kyle would have done it. And to his wife? In front of the kids? No way. I cannot believe that was anything but an extremely bad artistic choice by Eastwood.
Maybe Eastwood was remembering how Dirty Harry pointed his gun at people all the time and it was super dramatic and cool. I loved the movie but that scene was so jarring to me that it took me out of the experience and had me wondering “how did no one say that’s a stupid scene?” Even Bradley Cooper should have known it was crazy after all the time he spent with real soldiers getting ready for the film.
And everyone is correct that it wouldn’t make any difference whatsoever if the gun was “unloaded.” You don’t point an “unloaded” gun at your wife for fun. A terrible scene in a good movie.
I fully agree. That scene was absolutely pointless and did nothing to further the story or characters. It was out-of-place and weird.
Side note - what did everyone think when his wife phoned him when he was first deployed and she goes “Did you kill anybody yet?” I actually yelled at the TV.
Dingbang, out of curiosity, did you know his wife as well? I can’t imagine a real military wife being so insensitive.
Having seen the movie since, I can now say that between pointing a revolver at his wife and Bradley Cooper’s Rocket Racoon grin, the movie effectively made Chris Kyle appear insane. Honestly, if I didn’t already know the backstory, I would have assumed this was the scene where Kyle went to jail for manslaughter for accidently shooting his wife.
On a tangential note, I felt that the film was just “ok”. I dont know how realistic it was, but it felt a little too much like they were trying to turn Kyle into a one man super-soldier winning the war with his team of superfriends.
Why is a Navy SEAL sniper going on all these non-snipery intel gathering operations that I would assume would be more appropriate for the CIA or some other intelligence operatives? Do SEALS do that?
Who was covering Kyle’s job when he decided to go kick in doors with the Marine entry teams?
Can military personel just call friends and family from the battlefield whenever they feel like? Particularly during a firefight? The team in Lone Survivor could barely contact their base, let alone their wives.
Maybe that’s how SEALS deploy, but the constant back and forth between civilian life and the field made Kyle felt more like a business consultant with an extensive travel schedule than a soldier deployed to a battlefield.
The Poochie the Dog ending felt a bit tacked on (“Chris Kyle died on the way back to his home planet”)
You have perhaps not watched very many of Clint Eastwood’s movies. Eastwood is not an idiot and his films are extremely clever.
If the sense you (and pretty much everyone else) got out of that scene was that Kyle was unsettlingly weird and reckless and everyone seemed to think he was okay, there is a rather excellent chance that Clint Eastwood wanted you to think Kyle was unsettlingly weird and reckless and people incorrectly thought he was okay.
I have not seen the movie but I am familiar with his story.
He was not there as just a sniper. He was part of a team. Sometimes the mission did not call for a sniper so he went in with the door kickers. Some of his valor awards were not for being a sniper. In those small teams each person is cross trained in the other jobs too.
As for the phone, Kyle was in Iraq. Iraq was never in as bad shape as Afghanistan is on its best day. Especially as the years went on Iraq had a pretty strong cellphone network. When I was there many soldiers had private cell phones or Iraq SIM cards. I found it too expensive but it didn’t stop a lot of people. And of course if you wanted to put out the money you could get a sat phone. Some high ranking people had government sat phones and I’m sure there were many in special ops units.
SEALs have there own rules but normal Navy deployments were 6 months. I was in a few joint units and we periodically had navy personnel switch out.