I caught Jarhead this past weekend. If you stretched the first half of Full Metal Jacket into two hours and transported it to the desert, you’d have something very much like Jarhead – and that’s a good thing. Both films capture the comraderie, the humor, the arbitrary discipline, the suckiness, and the testosterone of an all-male military outfit, but Jarhead removes the battle scenes and adds in the endless boredom and waiting that constituted the first Gulf War.

The film rarely plays around with any political themes and only shows a glimpse of post-war life, but again this is not a bad thing as the film focuses on one thing – the experience of one Gulf War Marine – and does it well. “Welcome to the suck,” one character muses about five times, and it makes sense that this utterance became the movie’s now infamous tagline.

One scene that has been getting a lot of attention is when Apocalypse Now is screened for a large group of soldiers before the war; during the famous Valkyrie helicopter scene the soldiers cheer and pump their fists as American bullets and bombs tear into a small village in which a crowd of school children are present. I liked the film homage, but was a little disappointed when the leaders turn the projector off for an important announcement – I would’ve liked to have seen the look of exasperation and boredom on the soldiers’ faces during the Marlon Brando scenes at the end of the movie. And then maybe they could have ended Jarhead with Peter Sarsgaard croaking not “The horror … the horror” but “The suck … the suck.”