American Sniper True Story: 12 Things The Movie Changes

This article contains discussions/references to terrorism, death, and trauma.

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Is American Sniper based on a true story? The movie claims to tell the true story of Chris Kyle, but it took artistic liberties with Kyle’s life and changed the book’s narrative. Released in 2014, American Sniper charts Kyle’s childhood, early adulthood, military career, retirement, and ultimately his untimely death. Bradley Cooper stars as Kyle in director Clint Eastwood’s loose film adaptation of American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History. The movie earned six Oscar nominations, including a Best Picture nomination for Eastwood and a Best Actor nomination for Cooper.

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While Kyle was celebrated for his success as the deadliest marksman in U.S. military history, his tours of duty during the War in Iraq took a huge toll on his marriage, which became the main conflict of the film. Critics praised Cooper’s committed performance and Clint Eastwood’s engaging direction, but American Sniper was controversial for its historical inaccuracies. According to the data site Information is Beautiful, there is just 56.9% of footage that makes American Sniper a true story.

12

Chris Kyle Never Had To Shoot A Child

It Was A Woman Who He Shot Rather Than A Child

In the opening scene of American Sniper – and the opening of Kyle’s memoir – the pressures of Kyle’s sniping career are demonstrated when he sees a woman hand an anti-tank grenade to a child, who then approaches a U.S. military convoy, and Kyle has to decide whether to pull the trigger.

This is a moment that the movie uses to show that the enemy is more vile and evil than they might have been otherwise because they are sending a child to their death, proving they have fewer morals than one might expect. In real life, there was no child (via The Guardian); the woman herself carried the grenade to the convoy.

Kyle described this incident as “the only time I killed anyone other than a male combatant.” This is still a tough issue, but it was an adult woman who was the threat, and she did this of her own volition. However, in the movie, it wouldn’t have had the same impact that it did when he had to decide whether to kill a child or not.

11

The 1998 U.S. Embassy Bombings Didn’t Influence Kyle’s Decision To Enlist

Kyle Wanted To Enlist Since High School

The filmmakers simply used it as a visual shorthand to demonstrate Kyle’s need to defend his country.

In the movie, Bradley Cooper’s Kyle is motivated to enlist in the U.S. military when he watches the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings on television but this didn’t influence his real-life decision to enlist. Kyle had intended to join the military after he graduated from high school. The filmmakers simply used it as a visual shorthand to demonstrate Kyle’s need to defend his country.

It also had nothing to do with a cheating girlfriend, as the film suggests. In the book on which the movie is based, there is no cheating girlfriend, so this was just added to the film as one of the reasons he wanted to get away and join the military. In the movie, this was when he approached the recruitment office to enlist.

With no cheating girlfriend, it was also easy to embellish the entire embassy bombing as a reason to enlist as well, though that makes it the easiest to disprove. Kyle enlisted on August 5, 1998 and the U.S. embassy bombings took place on August 7, 1998 — two days after he enlisted.

10

Rodeo Injuries Almost Prohibited Kyle From Joining The Military

Kyle Wasn’t Accepted At First Like He Was In The Movie

When Kyle first enlisted to join the military, he was turned down due to injuries he had sustained from bronco-busting rodeos (via Slate). While he did get a full-time ranch job after he left Tarleton State University after attending for two years (before dropping out), Kyle got a call from Navy recruiters who had changed their minds and decided to accept him into the Marines.

The movie streamlines this part of the story to save time, so Kyle goes straight from the rodeo circuit to Marine weapons training. The timeline here is also crucial in disproving this discrepancy when exploring how much of American Sniper is based on a true story.

DID YOU KNOW: To play Kyle, Bradley Cooper spent six months working out for 4.5 hours a day (via Variety).

Kyle became a professional Bronco rider in 1992, but the injury ended his career and he then went to Tarleton State University from 1992 to 1994. He enlisted in the Navy on August 5, 1998. That means his injury happened six years before he enlisted in the military.

9

Kyle’s Wedding Wasn’t Interrupted By The Outbreak Of War

Kyle Already Knew About His Deployment

In the movie adaptation of American Sniper, Kyle’s wedding to his wife, Taya (played by Sienna Miller), is interrupted by the news that America is going to war following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In real life (via Slate), Kyle had already learned that he was going to be deployed, so he and Taya decided to get married during a brief period of leave from military training before he was shipped off to war.

Kyle went into great detail about his meeting Taya and falling in love in his book. This relationship began after he finished his SEAL training. However, the big change came when discussing their wedding itself. Making the wedding get interrupted because America declared war caused tension, pain, and struggles in their relationship and eventual marriage.

That is a lot more exciting for a movie than the truth as the war started on October 7, 2001. Kyle got married on March 16, 2002, before his deployment but five months after the U.S. declared war.

8

Mustafa Is Partly Fictional

Mustafa Was Never Really Kyle’s Nemesis

The American Sniper movie introduces a Syrian sniper named Mustafa, an ex-Olympic sharpshooter (played by Sammy Sheik), who is Kyle’s main “opponent.” This is a partially fictional character (via The Guardian). A notorious sniper is briefly mentioned in one paragraph of Kyle’s memoir, but he’s not the main villain of the story like he is in the movie. In his book, Kyle wrote,

“I never saw him, but other snipers later killed an Iraqi sniper we think was him.”

This is one of the most Hollywood-ized elements of the film adaptation. The movie dedicates its climactic sequence to Kyle and Mustafa’s dramatic fight to the death. The fact that Kyle never battled this sniper to the death in real life shows that sometimes a movie has to fictionalize things to create a more exciting story. Just showing Kyle killing people from a long distance without facing danger wouldn’t have made for a good enough movie. American Sniper needed a villain, even if he didn’t exist in real life.

7

The Butcher Is Fictional

The Butcher Was Made Specifically For The Movie

Mido Hamada plays “The Butcher,” an infamous terrorist who attacks small children, in the movie adaptation of American Sniper. The Butcher is depicted as al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s second-in-command. Although he’s thought to be inspired by Ismail Hafidh al-Lami, also known as Abu Deraa (via The Guardian), who was blamed for thousands of deaths in the mid-2000s, the Butcher is a fictional character.

Once again, this was how Clint Eastwood put a face on the villains. Having Kyle shoot people from a long distance as a sniper does not make for a personal movie experience. The movie needs evil people doing evil things to make Kyle’s kills mean something more.

By creating The Butcher and having him kill children, it makes Kyle look even more heroic in the end.

By creating The Butcher and having him kill children, it makes Kyle look even more heroic in the end. Unlike real life, American Sniper makes sure the Americans are heroic and the villains are evil and horrible people.

6

The Scene In The Civilian House Was Invented For The Movie

The Scene Was Added For Additional Tension

In one scene in the American Sniper movie, Kyle and his fellow SEALs take shelter in a civilian house, where they are welcomed with a meal. However, when they find weapons hidden under the floorboards, they realize the family is pro-insurgency and enter an intense shootout with them. This scene doesn’t appear in Kyle’s memoir and was invented just for the film (via Slate).

This is an even more questionable addition than the fake villains of The Butcher and Mustafa. While creating those villains made for a person the viewer wants to see defeated, the addition of the family is one that shows that there are evil people everywhere that Americans have to fear.

Even kind people who take in soldiers and feed them could be terrible insurgents and murderers and Kyle has to murder this family to protect himself and his allies. It is a sad moment and one that never really happened.

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5

Kyle And Taya Mostly Communicated Via Email

The Phone Calls Were Just To Add A Personal Touch To American Sniper

In the American Sniper movie, Kyle frequently speaks to his wife Taya on the satellite phone, and she’s horrified to hear the sounds of battle in the background. In reality (via The Washington Post), this only happened once. Kyle and Taya mostly communicated via email, but that’s nowhere near as cinematic as a phone call where the actors can express all their emotions through dialogue, so the filmmakers changed the emails to phone calls.

This does make sense as there is something very impersonal about reading emails from someone. That would never carry the emotion of the marriage between Kyle and Taya. It also would have eliminated her hearing the fighting in the background, which serves to traumatize her in the movie.

DID YOU KNOW: Before filming began, Bradley Cooper spent time with Kyle’s family and friends, who gave him access to his emails and home videos (via Variety).

By having the phone calls, the movie was also able to show the two of them as they spoke, which is important in telling the story of their love. This was just a change that had to be made, so the movie would work better.

4

Kyle’s Friends’ Stories Are Fictionalized

Kyle Never Disrespected Lee’s Death In Real Life

Both the memoir and its film adaptation feature many of Kyle’s friendships on the battlefield, but the two friends who recur the most – in both the book and the movie – are Ryan “Biggles” Job (played by Jake McDorman), and Marc Lee (played by Luke Grimes). In the film, Biggles is blinded by Mustafa, bolstering Kyle’s quest for vengeance against the fictional Syrian sniper, and dies shortly after proposing to his girlfriend.

In real life (via Slate), Biggles was discharged after his injury attended college, started a career, and got married before he passed away during his wife’s pregnancy with their first child. In the film, Lee’s death in the heat of battle is used to further the film’s pro-war message as Kyle argues his friend died because he lost faith in the war.

But, in reality, Kyle was much more sympathetic to the loss of his friend and paid graveside respects. In the film, Kyle scorns an anti-war letter that Lee wrote to his mother, but in the memoir, he praises the letter and supports his fallen friend.

3

The Bounty On Kyle’s Head Was Smaller And Applied To Any American Sniper

Kyle Wasn’t Special Enough To Get A Unique Bounty

The American Sniper movie illustrates Kyle’s notoriety with posters bearing his tattoos, which promised a $180,000 bounty to anyone who killed him. However, the reward was actually in the $20,000 to $80,000 range, and it applied to any American sniper, not just Kyle.

It turns out that Kyle himself debunked this part of the movie when she spoke to Conan O’Brien and explained that the enemy did want him dead, but they had the same bounty for all the American snipers that the insurgents could kill. Kyle was not special, and he was not notorious in the war. He was no different than any other sniper serving in the American armed forces.

However, putting his face on the posters and making him look like a real danger to anyone he faced made this story more about him and less about the overall military efforts in the war. That works well since this is Kyle’s story, but it also disrespects every other soldier who fought in the war, all of whom were treated the same as Chris Kyle.

2

Kyle Came Home From War To Avoid Divorce

In The Movie, Kyle Came Home Dejected After Killing Mustafa

In the movie, Kyle decides to come home from war after killing Mustafa and determining that he feels too dejected to keep fighting. However, in real life, he decided to come home to avoid a divorce. His military service was putting a strain on his marriage and Taya had threatened to leave him if he didn’t come home (via Slate).

While the movie did show the two fighting about him reenlisting, the movie didn’t show that this was the main reason he finally decided to leave the service. Killing Mustafa couldn’t have been the reason he wanted to come back home since Mustafa wasn’t even a real person and Jyle never had that life-or-death battle with the man. That was the hero’s journey that led to him returning home as a hero, yet a broken man.

However, that isn’t why he came back home. At the end of his real-life military career, Kyle came back home to his wife and his baby because he valued saving his marriage over serving another tour.

1

Kyle’s Final Conversation With Taya Isn’t In The Book

However, The Conversation Supposedly Did Happen

The film ends with Kyle’s death as he heads to a shooting range with veteran Eddie Ray Routh, who would ultimately kill him. In the movie, Kyle has a heartfelt final conversation with his wife before leaving for the shooting range. This conversation doesn’t appear in the book, but American Sniper screenwriter Jason Hall wrote in an addendum to a new edition of the memoir that Taya had described the conversation to him (via Slate).

Interestingly, by adding this final scene, the movie was able to make it about his life, and not bother with his actual murder, which could have put attention on the man who killed him. With that said, this was one moment that wasn’t in the book but was apparently a true story according to his wife.

However, the timing doesn’t add up. Kyle and Taya had this talk a month before he went to the shooting range and died, and the movie moved it to right before the fateful moment to add tragedy to the script.

How The Changes To American Sniper Were Received

More than a decade after its release, American Sniper remains a controversial war movie largely because of how it addresses the truth. While any movie based on a true story is going to change facts to fit a narrative, many critics of American Sniper felt that those changes go beyond understandable film storytelling and veer into the realm of irresponsibly rewriting history. Chris Kyle was known for offering his beliefs which many would disagree with. However, some have suggested the movie changes facts in order to make those beliefs more palatable.

Vox outlined some of the egregious changes American Sniper makes to the true story, particularly in regard to the war. They suggest that the gray truth about the War in Iraq is glossed over with a black-and-white explanation that makes Kyle seem like the noble hero fighting for a worthy cause rather than an invasion based on more controversial reasons:

The film finds time for entire scenes of Kyle viewing TV news reports about al-Qaeda’s 1998 bombings of US embassies, and the planes hitting the Twin Towers on 9/11. And when Kyle gets to Iraq, his commander explains that they are hunting the leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq. The inference we’re supposed to gather is clear: that Kyle is fighting the same people who attacked America in 1998 and 2001.

By contrast, the actual reasons for the Iraq war go unmentioned. The words “Saddam Hussein” are never uttered in the movie. Nor are “George Bush,” “Sunni,” “Shia,” or “weapons of mass destruction.”

One Redditor addressed how the movie paints the Iraqi people, making them into faceless enemies in order to make Kyle’s fight against them more clear-cut and heroic:

I take issue with war films that paint an enemy in absolute evil- especially without giving a single shred of motivation. This is one of them. I understand patriotism, but not when you begin to turn a blind eye. The problem is; I’m already reasonably patriotic. I don’t need to be appealed to. What I like is a film that teaches me something I didn’t know. I want my beliefs to be challenged as I believe this is what keeps you honest. American Sniper doesn’t do this in the slightest. It paints a picture of a cowboy from Texas going to fight the SAVAGE (they literally say this unironically) enemy in Iraq.

Most interestingly, an Iraq War veteran named Brock McIntosh voiced his view that American Sniper is “dangerous” for its distortion of reality. McIntosh reasons that he doesn’t blame Kyle for this but rather the filmmakers for making his views of the war facts by changing the reality of why the war was being fought and what the enemy was like.

Most disturbingly, McIntosh points to the scene in which Kyle takes aim at a young child with his fellow soldier warning him of the severe repercussions if he is wrong. McIntosh points out that those repercussions won’t likely exist. As he explains, for the movie to suggest that Kyle would be punished for shooting a civilian gives the impression to the audience that this kind of thing doesn’t happen when it does in reality (via Waging Nonviolence).

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American Sniper

Biography

Drama

Action

War

8/10

10/10

Release Date

December 25, 2014

Runtime

132minutes

Director

Clint Eastwood

Writers

Jason Hall

Cast

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Bradley Cooper
Sienna Miller

American Sniper is based on the true story of U.S. Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle and his tour of duty in Iraq. The film explores his legendary career on the field as he battles hidden in enemy lines to protect his brothers in arms despite the growing bounty on his head and the havoc it wreaked on his personal life.

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Source: https://dinhtienhoang.edu.vn
Category: Entertainment

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It Was A Woman Who He Shot Rather Than A Child

11 atOptions = { 'key' : '69b4682f085e35047f8cd7d38eacd0f1', 'format' : 'iframe', 'height' : 250, 'width' : 300, 'params' : {} }; The 1998 U.S. Embassy Bombings Didn’t Influence Kyle’s Decision To Enlist