Shooter Is Sniper Porn

There are films that seem like they give you a glimpse into another world, films like "Babel," "Dark Days," "Amores Perros." Ostensibly, these films offer an unadulterated examination of the lives of people who you would never normally interact with. They are, in many ways, fascinating yet also to some degree pornographic. They rely heavily on the fact that they're showing you something new, something fresh, something unknown, in order to hold your attention. And while comparing "Babel" to a film like "Shooter" is a really bizarre thing to do in any circumstance, that's loosely what i'm doing today.

I saw shooter on DVD the other day and found it to be offensive, pointless, disgusting...yet somehow awesome. But the most fascinating part of the film is that it wants you to think it knows a lot about sniping. Take this bit of dialogue:

"Long shots generally go places you wouldn't want to go afterwards to confirm'em. Confirmation does pose a problem. You know what it takes to make a shot a that range? Everything comes into play that far. Humidity, elevation, temperature, wind, spin drift. There's a six to ten second flight time so you have to shoot it where the target's going to be. Even the Coriolis effect, the spin of the Earth comes into play. President will be wearin' body armor, that means a head shot, at over a mile? You believe there is a shooter involved capable of makin' this shot?"

"Yes."

"Then you got a real problem. You got to find the shooter."

A scene like this is really interesting to me. It makes one feel enlightened, yet at the same time probably does nothing to scratch the surface of what's really involved in being a good sniper. While educating, it also perpetuates our ignorance, allowing us to wallow in our minimal knowledge of a subject. And to a significant degree, that's what movies like shooters are all about: Giving you a glimpse into the unknown, but only enough that the unknown is sexy, unreal, and unattainable.

Mostly though, we just watch these movies to watch people killing other people. Expertly. To this extent, Shooter delivers (This is the movie's climax):


Click here for the clip