--- title: 'This Is How You Get JARHEAD Sequels' source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=i5m-RHS1fU0' video_id: 'i5m-RHS1fU0' date: 2026-07-01 duration_sec: 2702 --- # This Is How You Get JARHEAD Sequels > Source: [This Is How You Get JARHEAD Sequels](https://youtube.com/watch?v=i5m-RHS1fU0) ## Summary ## Transcript Oh my god

 If you are discussing the ending  of the movie without discussing   these scenes and how they inform  the meaning of the final shots you aren’t actually discussing the ending  of the movie, you’re writing fanfiction.

 This is how you get Jarhead sequels.

 Do you want Jarhead sequels? [gliching] ‘Cus this is how  you get Jarhead sequels. [High energy stock music] This makes me cringe, it’s embarrassing Hey, that’s kinda messed up, right? Love being a marine. Oorah! The Iraq war was never popular, or rather  it was always a deeply polarized endeavour. It was transparently an illegitimate  conflict rooted in corporate interests,   Evangelical Millennialism,  and just general warmongering. The sort of thing that’d never happen today.  As an illegitimate conflict the supporters  were really sensitive about the whole deal,   like just really snowflake-y, if you said  anything bad about it they’d have a meltdown,   which made support of it a  mandatory social performance. Everybody remembers Freedom Fries, but let’s take  a moment to appreciate Star Spangled Ice Cream. [midi piano music] The anti-woke Ben & Jerry’s, Star  Spangled Ice Cream charged a patriotic   $76 for four quarts of flavours like “Iraqi Road”,   “Fightin’ Marine Tough Cookies & Cream”, “Navy  Battle Chip”, and “I Hate The French Vanilla”. "Among a dozen randomly selected taste  testers assembled by this reporter,   one called the taste ''undistinguished,''  another ''cheap -- like the little cups of   ice cream in elementary school,  the kind with wooden paddles.'' Famously, the band formerly known as The  Dixie Chicks had their career basically   ended as a result of speaking out  against it. The war. Not the icecream.  And that was just two years  before Jarhead came out. “I can’t watch. And Neither can you.” Okay, so, there’s these two producers, Philip  J Roth and Jeffery Beach, and they’re, like, capital-P producers, they’ve each got a  hundred, hundred and twenty producer credits, they’ve made a lot of movies, and  as the story goes they’re sitting   there in 2005 watching Jarhead,  and they get super offended. So, like, how it depicts the marine corp, how  it used George Bush’s Operation Desert Storm   as a setting to comment on George  W Bush’s Iraq War, all that stuff. They get so offended that a couple years later  they go out and buy the Jarhead intellectual   property rights specifically to turn it into an oh  rah respect the troops franchise. To fix Jarhead. Now, before we can talk about  a Jarhead sequel we need to   ask ourselves a question: What is a ‘Jarhead’? Jarhead is a 2005 film starring Jake  Gyllenhaal, directed by Sam Mendes and   written by William Broyles Jr., adapting a 2003  memoir of the same name by Anthony Swofford. Swofford served in the Marine corp as a  Scout Sniper during the Persian Gulf War,   and his memoir focuses heavily on the  particular dissonance of that war, the way that the Soldier Mentality  was drilled into them over, and over,   and over, and yet the reality  of their daily life was tedium. Jarhead the movie takes this strand and  really pulls on it: a central focus of   the movie is that the Marine Corp, the military  culture and mindset, is inherently destructive,   that war can and will destroy the lives of its  participants even if they never see combat. It is, in effect, pointing at the way  that the military machine takes young   men and trains them to be killers,  cultures them to crave combat,   makes killing a virtue, and goes  “hey, that’s kinda messed up, right? Like, that’s probably going to do some  irreversible damage that they’re going   to bring home with them regardless  of anything else that happens.” “You want a brand? You gotta earn it.” Jarhead basically argues that the Marine Corp  is a cult, that it uses intense peer pressure,   acute stress, repetition, vocabulary  control, and isolation as indoctrination   techniques straight out of the  playbook of any high-control group. “This is my rifle”

[In unison] “This is my rifle” In fact not only does it do this, it openly  lionizes that process, uses that process as   a conscious pressure point, tells recruits  that they need to be broken down and rebuilt,   and places a tremendous amount of shame  on the inability to endure that process. Not only that, it is able to do so by  leveraging decades and decades of pop   culture to instill the submission to that  process as a virtue, to sell that mindset. “What the fuck are you even doing here?”

“Sir,  I got lost on the way to college, sir!” “A flashlight was a moonbeam. A pen was  an ink-stick. A bed was a rack. A wall   was a bulkhead. A shirt wa a blouse. A tie was  still a tie and a belt a belt, but many other   things would never be the same.”

“That’s Vietnam  music, man. Can’t we get our own fucking music?”  Now, this isn’t unique to the US military,   it’s almost certainly as old as  professional soldiers themselves. And there’s a certain logic to it in part:   deployment and combat are prolonged  high-stress environments, so the number   one factor a military wants to filter  for is the ability to endure stress. But that logic becomes mythologised. It becomes an  ancient tradition, an exclusive brotherhood of the   warrior defined by purity rituals that ultimately  amount to little more than bog standard abuse. “How the fuck are you going to fire your rifle  when grenades are going off in your face?!” This process irrevocably damages the characters,   and while stories about soldiers who can never  quite truly return home are also very, very old,   Jarhead leaves that completely unvarnished because  the entire exercise was entirely pointless. See, the standard narrative for  a Hero’s Journey war story about   soldiers who are left changed forever  is that that damage is simply a cost   that was paid for something noble  and righteous and philosophical.  “Earn this” That is wholly absent in Jarhead: there is no  cause, the damage is in service of nothing,   and the human lives broken by the process  are simply discarded. Swofford is told,   and tells himself, that without his rifle  he is nothing, but at the end of it all “I never shot my rifle” Troy, who is about to be discharged for an  undisclosed criminal record, is so invested in the   identity that the Corps imbues him with that  he weeps with joy as the squad brands him. Even if the institution kicks him  out, Troy will always be a Jarhead. It’s, in part, their attempt  at giving him belonging. But   the damage is already done and  he takes his own life anyway. When the boys return home from Kuwait,  a Vietnam veteran jumps on their bus to   congratulate them and commiserate, but  it just makes everyone uncomfortable: he’s a pathetic figure, damaged  in ways that will never be fixed,   still clinging to the mythology of  a Corps that has clearly done him   no good over a decade after it tossed him  aside, and the boys see in him their future. It all ends with the affirmation  that Swofford will in some way or   another always belong to the  Corps, always be a Jarhead,  “And he sees that whatever else he might do  with his life, build a house, love a woman,   change his son’s diaper, he  will always remain a jarhead.” But this is in no way a celebration of the   esprit de corps of belonging  to a brotherhood of soldiers. It’s bleak, it’s cynical. The label “jarhead”, a self-deprecating military  nickname normally deployed with sardonic pride is   treated literally. The Marines have hollowed him  out, rebuilt him, and left nothing else inside. Jarhead, as it turns out, pretty  good movie, lot of complicated themes You could see how someone who really  deeply absorbed the Marines into their   identity might take offense to that,  or even just someone really invested   in the myth of it all, especially in  a post-9/11 War on Terror environment. [indistinct yelling] Now, this is gonna feel off-topic, but I’ve  wanted to talk about The Standard for years,   and now is as good a time as any.  I want you to understand that we aren’t making  up a guy here, and that there is a certain   kind of dude, the tactical operator,  who sees himself in a certain way. The Standard is a 2020 documentary  directed by Phil Wall and produced   by GORUCK Media. You probably haven’t seen  it, and that’s okay - it isn’t very good. It’s a really good example  of a counter-documentary,   one where the clear intent of the piece, the  things that people say and the messages that are   conveyed by the filmic language, are completely  at odds with the things that are actually shown. The Standard is ostensibly about the  most hardcore of hardcore military   tactical badassery training: US Special Forces. “GORUCK SELECTION is not only the toughest  endurance event on the planet, it’s also   an attempt to bridge the military-civilian  divide. Hosted by a group of Special Forces   combat veterans, this 48-hour challenge is a  condensed interpretation of the US Army’s 24-day   Assessment and Selection. For the participants,  the event is a chance to test their limits while   paying tribute to those who serve. For the  Special Force Cadre who lead the event, it’s   an opportunity to honor their roots and connect  with civilians. Less than 2% of participants   finished the first 18 iterations of the event.  Will anyone in Class 019 meet “The Standard?"” So, the frame here is that the US Special Forces  has a standard that applicants are expected   to perform to in order to be selected  for placement in a Special Forces unit,   and the GORUCK Selection is an endurance  event meant to mimic this process. Now, the word “standard” calls to mind something,  like, official, right? Something codified,   something measured, something standardized.  So the setup is like “this is the actual bar   that special forces need to meet.” It’s right up  there in the pitch: will anyone meet The Standard. But then you watch the actual documentary.  First off, just to get it out of the  way because of how obvious it is,   The Standard is just an ad for GORUCK, a company  that mostly makes tacticool backpacks that have   a reputation for being extremely durable but  uncomfortable, poorly laid out, and heavy. The movie is broken into two  parts, the Known and the Unknown. The Known portion is the first  twenty-ish minutes of the doc,   and it’s explicitly the US Army  Physical Fitness Standard Exam: participants must be able to do  fifty-five pushups in two minutes,   sixty-five sit ups in two minutes,  run 5 miles in 40 minutes or less,   and complete a 12 mile ruck in three and  a half hours, all in the same afternoon. By the way a “ruck” is just a hike, but you’ve got  a full kit on or in this case a GORUCK rucksack   mostly full of GORUCK slab weights to simulate  being full of ammo or canned food or whatever. After this Known portion we move into the Unknown  portion, which will take up the remaining hour and   15 minutes of the movie. The Unknown portion  is, unlike the Known portion, just vibes. Rancid vibes, but still vibes. It becomes pretty obvious pretty  quickly that everything the organizers   are having the participants do  is just kinda improvisational.  There’s a schedule of sorts, and  a lot of the stuff has technically   been planned ahead of time, but that  planning isn’t exactly systematized. They come up with an activity and then just make   everyone do it for an hour  or so before moving on.  There’s no numbers, there’s no goal,   and additional goals are added and removed  based purely on whether or not the cadre,  that’s the term for the ex-special-forces  dudes yelling at everyone,  whether or not they like you. And they’re actually pretty transparent about  that, at least to the confessional camera. “We’re basically saying ‘hey, you’re doing  really well’, we’ll build his ego up, you know,  because we’re looking to create  distance between two-eight and six-two,  that’s the, that’s the methodology.  So, the creation of distance, it’s the same  reason why a lion picks on the slow zebra,  why pick on the fast one?” This is what I mean about it  being a counter-documentary:  they really want you to think that this is some  actual standard that soldiers need to live up to,  that there’s something quantifiable in all this,  but then the truth is they’re just winging it.  They’re trying to stress everyone out,  but they do so based on convenience and bias,  and the amount of abuse you’re subjected to  relies heavily on if they like you or not.  “You still have a place to find comfort because   that candidate over there is  getting a lot of attention.” “This event is about fucking winning. Right now   you’re getting special attention  because you are fucking losing.” They pick on contestants  that they don’t vibe with, the highest performers get  easier tasks and longer breaks, and they make things harder  on the fly purely because   there’s too many people left in the competition. They’re an elite, exclusive event, after all,  they can’t have a bunch of people passing. Eventually it’s accidentally revealed that  all of this is just happening on Jason’s land. Jason McCarthy, the event organizer, is a former  Special Forces soldier with the US Army, serving   from 2003 to 2008, and he’s also the founder and  CEO of GORUCK, and most of this event is just   happening in his back yard, and they haven’t  bothered to, like, set anything up for this. If I say “military fitness endurance event” you   maybe conjure in your mind the image  of army obstacle courses, right?  The climbing walls, the ropes, the mud pits,  all that stuff, but there’s none of that here. No one’s timing anything, no one’s keeping notes.  There’s a whole bit where they just kinda mess  around with some logs that happened to be nearby.  Like, they’re not doing log drills,  because those are a teamwork exercise   and this is 100% anti-teamwork hyper-isolationist. “we’re looking to create distance  between two-eight and six-two” So, yeah, this isn’t a log drill,  this is just pushing around a log. There’s a clip of the winner of  a previous event where there’s   this whole sort of ceremony at the finish line,  so they’re standing in front of  this giant American flag and his   family is behind him with congratulatory signs,  but the whole time someone’s standing just  off camera spraying him with a garden hose,  because this is just something  someone made up on the fly. At one point they just have  them move a bunch of paving   stones for Jason’s gazebo  from one spot to another. And the fact that the cadre, you  know, they’re in pretty good shape,  they all seem like dudes  who hit the gym as a hobby,  but none of them have ever actually  completed their own course,  and frankly most of them wouldn’t. “I don’t want to show up for this, do  you?

Nobody does! Nobody wants to…

Blain,   Blain saw the POI, he goes  ‘nope, no thanks, I’m good.’” There’s kinda two things happening here at  the same time: one is the admission that to   what degree this does resemble actual  military behaviour and conditioning,   that behaviour and conditioning  is cult initiation stuff,  “Dominate the man in front of you” and second, the cultural mythology  of all that as a good thing. Having this reedy dork yell  at you for two days is good   because it gives you a taste of the  warrior spirit that he totally has. “I don’t want to show up for this, do you?” Frankly all of the cadre look  like awful people who would be   an absolute nightmare to have any  kind of personal relationship with,   people who have absorbed exactly the  kind of damage Jarhead is talking about. “Trample the weak, hurdle the dead, let’s go” “Start winning!” And you can easily imagine how someone like  Jason would be very, very upset about that.  I have no proof of this but I have to imagine  Jason doesn’t like Jarhead much at all. Jason is probably more of a Jarhead 2 kinda guy. [gunfire] Jarhead 2: Field of Fire is a  direct-to-video sequel released   in 2014. 

This is where Philip J. Roth  and Jeffery Beach come into the picture.  These guys have, no joke, over  100 movie credits as producers,  these guys are regularly producing anywhere  from three to seven movies per year,  mostly via Roth’s production  company UFO International. While it lifts some aesthetic  elements from Jarhead,  like a framing voice over, a few parallel lines,  and the general style and vibe of title cards, it is otherwise different in every way. There are no returning characters  and the story is wholly fictional.  Like, as a reminder, Jarhead is  based on Anthony Swofford’s memoir,   and Jake Gyllenhaal was playing  Swofford, a real person.  There’s none of that here, the only thing that  isn’t made up is the country of Afghanistan. Though from the sheer number of last names  in the credits ending with a ‘V’ I’m going   to assume this was shot somewhere  in eastern Europe like Bulgaria. The movie follows supply marines, who run  essential supplies through contested territory.  And there is a really interesting  Jarhead-esque movie in that premise.  Supply marines have a job that is both  extremely dangerous, and extremely dreary.  Like, early in the movie, the team  is driving through a gravel quarry,   when they spot some garbage on the road  which could be concealing an explosive.  So they stop and phone it in, and are instructed  to wait for the bomb squad to arrive,  and the team has to sit there for hours,   waiting for the experts to  investigate this pile of trash.  The marines are, simultaneously,  vulnerable, but also incredibly bored.  There is a tension between the mundane and  life-threatening elements of their job. And while having bomb specialists  investigate isolated trash piles in   the middle of the desert is arguably  an example of reasonable suspicion,  there are numerous examples of the  marines demonstrating unreasonable   suspicion - typically rooted in racism. “We’ve got movement at 12-o’clock!”

“Donkey!  Who’s that? That your boy?!”

“He’s just   carrying water to his village!”

“I  don’t care about his village.” So this could have been a movie about  paranoia inherent to Bush’s war on terror.  A movie about soldiers who are taught to treat  every aspect of the Muslim world with suspicion,   and are then dropped into the middle of it. A movie that confronts Western  war crimes in the Middle East,   and explores the ways in which those atrocities  are the natural consequence of systemic practices. …That is not Jarhead 2. The garbage pile has no thematic purpose,  it’s just that parked vehicles and people   standing around waiting is a really  inexpensive way to fill runtime. Where Jarhead was a simmering character  portrait of people driven mad for no reason,  victims of a machine,  Jarhead 2 is a troop movie about troops doing  very budget-conscious heroic troop stuff like   driving through a gravel quarry or standing  next to their humvees in a gravel quarry,   or diffusing bombs in a gravel quarry. It starts with a big ensemble of characters,   but most of them are killed off about  1/3rd of the way through the film,  and the bulk of the movie is the  significantly reduced cast doing   a ripped-from-the-headlines type story of  escorting a Malala Yousafzai proxy to safety. “She’s a keynote speaker at the  United Nations summit on human rights,   she’s scheduled to be in New York in 36  hours. This is direct from Washington,   she’s the president’s guest of honor.”
 But don’t worry, they make it a point that the   marines are willing to die for her without knowing  her identity, because darn it, that’s the mission. "You're willing to die for this chick?  We don't know anything about her." Anyway, there’s a bunch of gun fights,  and a One Of The Good Ones translator,   and a female marine who is in every way shape and  form Just One of the Boys because she’s a lesbian. “if I weren’t married and you  weren’t so obviously a lesbian” “I don’t care what she looks like as long as  she’s got a hot face and a banging body! Aaaah” “cringe, there’s no other word for it.  This makes me cringe, it’s embarrassing.” There are several moments  throughout the movie that   could be straight out of an Asylum production. [Explosion] “my leg’s all the way over there bro” “my leg’s all the way over there man!” [Explosion] [Wilhelm scream] The sequel loses the edge of  the first movie in a way that   is both hard to describe but extremely palpable. In the first movie, the character of  Fowler comes across a dead Iraqi soldier,   which he names Ahab the A-rab and objectifies  just out of frame. His behaviour is depraved,   and it’s explicitly said that  his behaviour is unacceptable. “The Army may pull this type of shit,   but the Marines don’t. When we get back  Fowler will be passing out shit paper.” Here in Jarhead 2, a character executes a wounded   Taliban fighter in a vengeance killing  that violates the Geneva convention.  While it’s not depicted positively, it is treated  as an appreciable response in the circumstances. “Cowboy up, you hear me? Get  back in the game, let’s go.” While the marines in Jarhead 1 are  trained to yearn to kill and infused   with a bloodlust that drives them mad,  with Troy literally kicking and screaming   on the ground for the opportunity to end  a human life, our protagonist here needs   to get your standard issue “it’s them  or you” lecture about the need to kill. “Before yesterday, I never even  fired my weapon at anybody.” “They died today, and we  lived. Today was a good day.” Jarhead 2 opens in an identical style for  the first movie, and on the surface it sounds   anti-war. The narration asks what the point is  in soldiers fighting and dying in the desert?  “He will go to the desert and fight and die. Why is he fighting? Why is he  dying? What’s the fucking point?” But at the end of the movie,   the narration answers that question with  just… the most cliche junk possible. “So what’s the fucking point? I guess the point  is responsibility of duty, love of country,   a way of life. Are we on the right side of  this? These aren’t our questions to ask.” Even the first movie’s use of “always  being a Jarhead” as a symbol of trauma   gets reframed to mean “mourning the  heroic sacrifices of our brothers.” “And the marines who killed and bled  and died, will always be Jarheads.” Jarhead 2 pays lip service to the  anti-war messaging of the first movie,   but its criticism of the military and the  military lifestyle are surface level complaints.  Just banal pet peeves that people bond over  because they all think it’s funny and irritating   that their boss wears really squeaky shoes or is  always showing off his guitar that he can’t play.  It’s trivial and shallow stuff. “Hot as hell. All this sand. Goat  everywhere. Ugly chicks. Ugly dudes.” So while Jarhead 2 is not hardline propaganda,   it does invert essentially every  message from the first film.  Its ultimate point is that the hardship  and sacrifice are worth it - that there   is a greater good to be served  and it is honourable to do so.  In other words, it’s an entirely  generic contemporary war film. “Alright Marines, six militants have just  stormed this raggedy-ass old embassy behind me.” Jarhead 3: The Siege is a 2016  direct-to-video sequel to nothing. This isn’t a sequel, at this point we can   officially consider Jarhead  to be an anthology franchise. If Jarhead 1 was about men going  mad in a desert for no reason,  and Jarhead 2 was about soldiers doing  cost-effective soldier stuff in a gravel quarry, Jarhead 3 is about a cowboy who blows up  the bad guy by shooting a propane tank. [Explosion] It’s very telling that in my note taking for the   Jarhead movies each installment’s  notes got shorter and shorter.  One might instinctively attribute  that to simply getting tired,   and I’ll admit I didn’t control for  that, this isn’t terribly scientific,  but where Jarhead has several  pages of notes and observations,   and we managed to squeeze some  juice out of what Jarhead 2 wasn’t,  the most prominent note I made on Jarhead 3  is that there is no visible penis on screen.
  It seems like at some point in making these  sequels someone sat down with the job to break   down Jarhead, really juice out the essence of it,  and they came up with a short list consisting of  Troops Courier font Time of day titles An on-screen penis Jarhead 1 and 2 both had the courage  to get the wang out, but in this,   the third installment, they’ve all but  completely winnowed away the original   Jarhead, all that’s left behind is  a voice over and some title cards. Jarhead has this really compelling voice over,   it’s one of the defining bits  of the movie, because it lets   you inside Swofford's head where he can say  things that are embarrassing or shameful,  admit to feeling and thinking terrible things,   and because we’re in Swofford’s  mind, in his memories,  Mendes uses this to create really  compelling little bits and contrasts,   like when the camera pulls back and  closes the door on a number of memories,   like visiting his sister in the hospital,  making muffins with his mother, and having   interesting breakfast conversations with dad,  because those memories don’t actually exist. Jarhead 2 at least uses the narration to  bookend the movie and monologue about “hope.” “And if we’re lucky, somewhere in all the  fighting and dying, we discover hope.” Jarhead 3: The Siege retains this voice over  for no real purpose beyond some vestigial brand   identity and is ultimately a fully  sincere embrace of military propaganda.  It’s also pretty stupid.

“I  was going to be number one,   kick some ass and show ‘em how it’s done.   Then dust off a bigger fish to fry”] The budget has gotten even smaller: this  is more or less a bottle movie where all   the events take place inside one small building, a US embassy in an unspecified middle eastern  country referred to only as “the Kingdom”,  though it looks suspiciously like somewhere  in Eastern Europe, possibly Bulgaria. The embassy gets attacked for reasons, and  then the marines shoot everyone and win.  And then the voice over comes in, in  the same place where the original was   like “I’ll always be a ‘jarhead’  (derogatory)" this one is like  “sometimes you get so caught up in thinking  about what you want to do that you don’t   see what you need to do, which is take a  career promotion within the US Marine Corp.” “Convincing ourselves of what we  want to do, what we have to do,   that sometimes we don’t see what we’re  meant to do.”

“Staff Sergeant Albright.” [Explosion] Whatever shallow resistance was still present in   Jarhead 2 is here fully replaced  with an overt love of the Corps.  That’s the message of Jarhead 3:  the Marine Corps is dope and cool   and the only reason to not join is because  you’re okay with being a second-rate loser. “I joined the Marines to be the best.” This is, to me, a particularly funny  parallel with Swofford’s reason for joining,   which was, you know, kinda a really  pivotal moment in that movie.

“Sir,   I got lost on the way to college, sir!”] Most reviews about this movie complain about   the fact that b-movie big guy Scott  Adkins doesn’t get a fight scene,  which is a true fact about this movie,  and you might find that  interesting, so there you go.  He plays this guy who is named... Gunny Raines. “All you care about is yourself and trying  to be some kind of goddamn rock star!” ‘Gunny’ is the Marine Corps  nickname for a gunnery sergeant,   I do know that, but I’m allowed to find it funny.  Didn’t you hear?  Comedy is legal again. But with the whole “being the best” thing,  it sure seems like our protagonist's arc   is going to be learning to quell his ego,  learn some patience and be part of a team. Throughout the whole movie,   his squadmates mockingly refer to him as  a ‘cowboy’ because of his recklessness. “You don’t always have to be first,   Albright. Sometimes being a good  marine means coming in last.” But it swings the complete opposite.  When Gunny Raines dies, spoiler alert for  Jarhead 3: The Siege, the ambassador promotes   our protagonist, the new guy, because he likes  the same initiative the squad took issue with. “He was the only one of you who tried to  do anything to stop this from happening.” And so our protagonist spends the rest  of the movie taking orders from no one,   being the first man in, being  the best, and at the end of the   movie the Major says “hell of a job”  and our hero gets Gunny’s old job. Like Corporal Albright himself, the  movie’s politics are too eager.  It loves the Marine Corps so much that it shoots  past propaganda and into the realm of fantasy.  Again, the villain of the  movie is a super terrorist   who Albright explodes by shooting a propane tank. [Explosion] Now that I think of it, the movie goes  out of its way to tell us that the team   are “security guards” who’ve “never seen combat”,  but man, they’re out here racking up  kill counts we only see in video games. [Gunfire] “I never shot my rifle.” Otherwise this movie is boring and  stupid and nothing of any note really   happens except the hot data analysis  lady who looks kinda like Dee from   It’s Always Sunny is actually CIA so  she’s secretly really good with a gun. “Not gonna lie, man, that’s hot.” Anyway, semper fi, I guess. [Indistinct yelling] Jarhead 4, a direct to video movie from  2019, drops the numbering in favour of box   art that aggressively references video game box  art.

The movie is about a US-born fighter pilot   named Ronan who is the son of a senator  and an Israeli citizen by Law of Return.  He lives in a massive house with  a huge pool and a hot wife,  but then he goes off on a mission of some  description in Assyrian airspace where   he’s shot down by an Iranian controlled Shiite  militia headed by a man known only as The Ghost. Now, it might seem like the field  of sunflowers that he crash lands   in is an odd choice, not really  evocative of Syria, but fun fact:  due to their tolerance for heat  and general pest resistance,   sunflowers are a popular crop for vegetable oil  production globally, from Syria to Bulgaria.  So, you know, props to the movie  for not just playing to Western   stereotypes about what Syria looks like by  setting the whole thing in a gravel quarry. Most of the movie follows an  international special forces   squad who were in Israel as part of a  training program and are sent to invade   Syria to rescue Ronan mostly because  they happen to be pretty close by. And so a member of that squad, Torres,   shares protagonist duties and is  actually who we start the movie with. That’s a pretty loaded setup, but this movie,   more than even the previous two, is  basically a Call of Duty campaign.  It’s not a very coherently told  story, mostly just a lot of scenes   populated with a roster of unmemorable  characters who do soldier things.  At this point the only vestige of Jarhead that  remains is the use of Courier as a typeface. Funny enough the movie is pretty  inaccurate with the military stuff:  dress codes are all over the  place, unbelievable things happen,   chain of command doesn’t really seem to exist,  but spiritually this is absolutely reverential to   the nebulous concept of the Warrior  and the modern military aesthetic.  If we’re looking at all the stuff  that Jason and his pals were yelling   at the civilians to make them feel like soldiers,  all the stuff about grabbing  victory and picking on the   weakest zebra because you want to know  that the guy beside you is a survivor,  this is easily the most in  line with that way of thinking. “I like hair on my balls” Despite the movie's emphasis on Israel, and  the villain being a militant anti-Zionist,  the film doesn’t even have the courtesy  to give us any incendiary politics.  It’s just the usual lines about  Israel’s right to defend itself. America and Israel have a very  complicated relationship, deeply   entwined with politics, military, and money,  and there’s a whole philosophical angle  where Jewish Zionists are trying to do a   Leibensraum and Christian Zionists are  trying to do the End of Evangelion and   manufacture prophecy that they believe  will herald the return of Jesus Christ,  and Jarhead 4 is part of that soft power system  that has led to and enabled an ongoing genocide,  but it is not a particularly  significant part in any way. As propaganda it is tepid and insubstantial:   we’ve already spent more effort explaining  it than the movie spent doing it. This isn’t Wolf Warrior 2, a movie where  a starving African child sits at a table   piled high with Chinese goods, flanked by a  kindly Chinese soldier, and stares straight   into the camera while eating fruit.

Jarhead:  Law of Return is, rather, a generic troop movie   that could be set basically anywhere that was  willing to toss the production some tax credits. Jarhead 3 at least pretended to  have an arc for its protagonist,   but the characters in Jarhead  4 are entirely static.  Nothing is learned, nobody changes  and nothing is even really gained. Jarhead 4 has ostensibly the exact same climax as  Jarhead 2, with a mission to rescue a hostage,  but while Jarhead 2 ratcheted  up the stakes by putting their   Malala Yousafzai proxy in the enemy stronghold,  Jarhead 4 has them intercept the convey so we can  have a shoot out in the middle of a dirt road. [Gunfire] So “the good guys” win the gunfight,   find the hostage and the movie  tries to convince us its over.  But we know it isn’t over, because  The Ghost hasn’t been dealt with.  So you know something is coming, but what  you probably weren’t expecting was for The   Ghost to snipe Torres dead and then  walk away, never to be seen again. And here’s the final word on that. “What the fuck just happened?” Same same. And then the credits then roll to a sad  cover of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”,   so I guess this was a movie  about sacrifice or something. [minor key, downtempo singing] “we’ll give  them a heart welcome then, hurrah, hurrah” So there’s a pretty clear divide here,   with Jarhead in one column and the  other three movies in the other.  It’s not just a shift in budget, but a seeming  wholesale flip of the underlying philosophy,  from derogatory Jarhead to proud Jarhead. So, who are the guys who did this?  Who was so offended by Jake Gyllenhaal’s  performance that they just had to “fix” it? “Do you want Jarhead sequels? ‘Cus  this is how you get Jarhead sequels.” Okay, so, I lied to you, but maybe  you already figured that out. The whole story about a couple producers  seeing Jarhead and getting bent out of   shape? Completely fictional.  Didn’t happen. We made it up. In fact it’s not even original, it’s a folk  story recycled from the 80s to try and explain   how Rambo went from PTSD-addled drifter  coming into lethal conflict with NIMBYs   to re-litigating Vietnam into an American  victory and running guns for the Mujahideen. It’s also not true with Rambo, it’s a  story that’s literally never been true. So, what’s the actual story here? If you figured out it was a fib, the thing  that tipped you off was probably the moment I   said that Roth and Beach have 120 movie credits  and were making as many as seven movies a year,   because that’s a number so absurd  that it means one of two things:   either these guys are fake and I made them  up too, or these are not the kind of guys   who care at all about what Jarhead  did or didn’t say, only what sells. If you scrutinize the movies  from their filmography the   pattern becomes very obvious almost instantly. Python 2, Lake Placid 2, Boogyman 3, The Grudge  3, Messengers 2, Wrong Turn 3, Lake Placid 3,   Lake Placid: The Final Chapter, Sniper: Legacy,  Sniper: Ghost Shooter, Doom: Annihilation. Oh, but it’s not just sequels, it’s also  knockoffs, like Python, Falcon Down,   Post Impact, and the absolutely inexplicable  Grendel, which was quickly and cheaply   produced to siphon off of Zumeckis’ animated  Beowulf, which was itself a massive flop. I mean, it’s gotta be that, right?  The only other nearby option is the  2005 Canadian Icelandic co-production   Beowulf & Grendel starring Sarh Polley and  Gerard Butler, which is this really slow   moving naturalistic re-telling of the  myth without the supernatural elements,   and it only made like $92,000 in theatres because  it basically only ran the festival circuit because   it’s a dreary Canadian art film, and that’s  all this fake ass imposter country can produce. Sorry, where were we. Right, Post Impact, starring Dean  Cain, I actually have that one on DVD,   from back when Dean Cain was just a sad  wash out and not a sad racist wash out. These movies, this strata of movie,  you already know it and love it,   just from the generic ass titles, but if you’re  not familiar I can sum it up in one clip. “This is really screwed up, I mean to  get killed for seven bucks an hour.   This was everyone’s first night  on this job, this is bullshit.” “Looks like everyone’s last  night.”

“That’s cold, dude.” Now, hold on to your asses, ‘cus this  next fact is gonna make your asses,   like, fall off, or something,  but would you believe me if I told you that   Philip J Roth just happens to  have emigrated to Bulgaria?  Would it shock you to learn that  UFO International has a back lot   in Bulgaria with a “generic Middle  Eastern town” and an “Afghan village   that nevertheless can easily play as  a Medieval or Latin American village”? No, no, of course you wouldn’t.  This is all so mundane that it’s borderline  offensive that I’d even pretend it’s a surprise. The other party in all this is  Universal 1440 Entertainment,   which is just Universal’s direct-to-video arm. Universal owns the rights to Jarhead,   no one ever “bought the rights” just to  turn it into pro-military propaganda.  The hidden hand here is a guy named Glenn  Ross, who was the General Manager and   Executive Vice President of Universal 1440  from 2005 up until his retirement in 2024. Glen’s whole job, which he  was evidently quite good   at given that he held the job for  19 years at, you know, Universal,   was to find budget conscious opportunities  amongst Universal’s existing holdings.  “I mean what we were designed to do  is build brands within the studio.   So if you look at the studio’s  IP, intellectual property rights,   for films that were released theatrically  any time in the last 50 years, really,   and see if there’s anything there that  we could do a sequel to or a prequel to” The main strategy here, which was  viable until shockingly recently,   was a primary focus on direct media  sales, which means DVDs and BluRays   sold through budget-conscious  retailers, which means WalMart. To the amazement of absolutely no one, there  is no wacky story and no wild scheming. How you get Jarhead sequels is simply that there  exists a machine to sell movies via physical discs   that relies on making frictionless films that  will appeal to a hypothetical median WalMart   Shopper in Ohio, and that hypothetical  just happens to look a lot like this guy. “Why are you still here filling  water up? Hurry up! Fill up water,   fast. Move out, fast. Pack your shit up, fast.” The machine wasn’t built to “fix” Jarhead,   because it doesn’t need to be.  This is just what the machine does. “Grab your fucking shit and go.” In talking about the thematic and structural  similarities between the movies, there’s a really,   really good chance that not a single one of  the sequels was even written to be a sequel,  but was just a preexisting script pulled  from a massive pile because it checked the   boxes of troops, Middle East, R-Rated, with  a breakdown estimate under $5 million US.  Hence all the aesthetic similarities to Jarhead  being extremely superficial things like titles. One last factor in all of this,  in the 2010s with the rise of the   Marvel Cinematic Universe and Netflix the  mid-budget movie all but disappeared as the   studios went functionally all-in  on four-quadrant blockbusters. A big part of how you get Jarhead sequels is that   you just don’t get Jarheads  in the first place anymore.  Outside a smattering of movies  from known indie darling directors   and smaller studios the budgets for  movies has aggressively polarized,  movies are either insanely  expensive or extremely low budget. This shift happened very quickly, leading to a lot   more of Universal’s bottom line  riding on Glen’s work at 1440,  leading to Glen pulling out  literally anything they’ve   got that can put something recognizable on a box:  everything’ gotta be a franchise  now, whether it makes sense or not. So, yeah, maybe I won’t be terribly surprised  if in 2027 Paramount Famous Productions and UFO   International release Annihilation 2: Absolution  starring the artist formerly known as Jojo Siwa   alongside a couple character actors you recognize  but can’t quite place and the whole thing is a   bottle episode set in a suspiciously Bulgarian  part of Florida, or maybe at a “6400 square foot   arctic facility that is surfaced with  concrete to allow easy snow coverage”. Just kidding, it’ll be an AI  slopfest starring literally no one. “Coming this fall.”

“A movie literally  no one asked for.”

“A bunch of AI slop,   sloshed together for your eyeballs.” Okay, okay, we’re not gonna do that, we’re  not gonna do that, I’ll spare you.

This was   originally just a one-off gag about some slop  I found on YouTube, but the longer I thought   about it the more I realized it’s relevant,  because we’re talking about machines, right? We’re talking about this machine that just, like,   creates propaganda by virtue  of thoughtlessness, right? It’s just trying to appeal to a  hypothetical audience and so it   generates this military propaganda as a matter  of the frictionless path through culture. AI’s gonna calcify that. It’s just going to endlessly  regurgitate what already exists. Every movie from here to the heat-death of the   universe is just going to star  the cast of The Force Awakens. So the way this is going is we’re going to  get more and more propaganda that’s going   to reenforce the hegemonic structures of our  society, and it’s just going to feed itself. All of the stuff that we’ve  already made is going to be   the fuel to make even more  of the exactly same stuff. That’s just movies now. That’s just  how it’s going to work. Forever. So, anyway, I guess that’s a kinda  grim, bleak way of looking at things. But I dunno, maybe things aren’t so hot right now. Maybe a video about propaganda and  how it gets thoughtlessly produced Maybe it doesn’t need a chipper final note. Maybe it should just let the credits roll, and,   like, if you wanna watch more Folding  Ideas here’s… here’s some links.