Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
Following a brutal engagement in Iraq the soldiers of Bravo Squad are brought home to burry one of their own and be honored in a brief victory/press tour working up to an appearance in the halftime show of a major Thanksgiving Day football game. Among the soldiers, 19 year old unspoken leader of the squad Billy Lynn (Joe Alwyn) is front and center to everything. Haunted by the passing of his first Sergeant, Shroom (Vin Diesel), Billy sees the world through two sets of eyes, soldier and civilian, questioning what is love, what is life, what is real?
Directed by Ang Lee and based on the novel by Ben Fountain, this unevenly paced experience makes an oddly balanced attempt at examining people’s perspective during war, often falling flat footed and on the nose with poorly scripted rhetoric. However, from a cinematic perspective Lee is certainly making a bold attempt to bring audiences into the mind of soldier suffering from PTSD, although it’s hard to say how the film actually looks given that Sony Pictures only allowed critical audiences in Seattle to witness the film in 2D and 24 frames per second instead of the Director’s intended 3D and 120 frames per second, a significant difference. And, not that a solid film and story should be reliant upon technology, one is left to wonder, what am I missing? Still, the bottom line comes down to stale dialogue between beats and flat action even while in battle, end result, a shoulder shrug instead of an eye pop. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is rated R.