| Field | Details |
|---|---|
| Movie Name | STOP-LOSS (2008) |
| Director | Kimberly Peirce |
| Writer | Mark Richard, Kimberly Peirce |
| Lead Actor | Ryan Phillippe |
| Cast | Ryan Phillippe, Abbie Cornish, Joseph Gordon-Levitt |
| Genre | Drama, War |
| Release Date | March 28, 2008 (United States) |
| Duration | 1h 52m(112 min) |
| Budget | $25 million |
| Language | English |
| IMDB Rating | 6.4/10 |
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STOP-LOSS
After a harrowing and heroic tour of duty in Iraq, Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe, Breach) and his buddies return to the United States to a hometown parade and honors from U.S. Senator Worrell (Josef Sommer, X-Men: The Last Stand).
Brandon’s enlistment is up, but his best friend, Steve (Channing Tatum, She’s the Man), decides to reenlist and become a sniper.
When Brandon turns in his gear, he discovers that he has been stop-lossed (involuntary extension of active-duty service). He must return to Iraq because there are not enough fresh, trained recruits to take the place of veterans.
Senator Worrell had told Brandon to contact him if he ever needed anything, so the young man goes AWOL and heads for Washington, D.C. Steve’s girlfriend, Michelle (Abbie Cornish, Elizabeth: The Golden Age), drives the getaway car. Along the way, they meet other veterans on the run and a badly wounded member of Brandon’s unit.
This film joins In the Valley of Elah, Lions for Lambs and others that endeavor, through cinema art, to raise awareness about the Iraq war’s moral ambiguities. It is a pro-soldier film that elicits empathy for the heartbreaking psychological and physical damage to our military men and women during combat and after.
Directed (and co-written) by Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry), this is a buddy film in which the character chooses between self-preservation and self-sacrifice for his friends, leaving political ideology behind. Ryan Phillippe gives an exceptional performance as we are led into a narrative quagmire with a point instead of a plot.
Films that question the premise and function of the Iraq war are not popular with the American public, perhaps because the ideological perspectives and battle realism create uneasiness and distress in the audience.
Stop-Loss and other movies of this new subgenre of the war film expand the discourse about war, and the Iraq war in particular. Such films question the tenuous comfort created by the status quo just as they test our fundamental concepts of right and wrong, justice and injustice, integrity, morality, ethics and, above all, the common good. Mature themes, crass language graphic, intense battlefield violence.
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