(CNN) -- "Jarhead," a blow-by-blow first-person account of the Persian Gulf War, is far less compelling than Anthony Swofford's 2003 memoir of the same name on which the movie is based. By ...

The same could be said of war movies, though the things that distinguish “Jarhead" don’t exactly burn as brightly as those Kuwaiti oil fields. 2 1/2 stars (R: language, some violent images ...

"Jarhead," it certainly makes for an unusual war movie -- maybe the only one in which the hero sees little in the way of combat and his platoon suffers no casualties. For a movie that deals so ...

I never see movies made from books I like ... Such is the boredom of waiting for war. Waiting is what Jarhead is all about. When the colonel warns that “the bureaucrats have a lot of jawboning ...

Sam Mendes’s Jarhead is a war movie in which the soldiers never quite reach the war itself. Instead, Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his unit (which includes characters played by Peter Sarsgaard ...

Jarhead is based on the real-life Swofford ... One of the year’s most anticipated and best movies, Civil War feels almost too close to home at times. The surprisingly quiet film depicts ...

Among war movies that have made their mark with remarkable ... vessel in South American water during the Napoleonic Wars. “Jarhead,” which is a nickname for a U.S. marine, is a psychological ...

In Anthony Swofford’s Gulf War memoir Jarhead, Swofford recalls joining ... My Generation and Sent Us to War.”) Is it true that movies glamorize whatever they touch, no matter how horrific?