Purple hearts is unwatchable propaganda with no redeeming qualities

I refuse to believe this movie and the book it's based on exist. I just cannot exist in a world where that's a thing that happened. This isn't just any bad movie, don't get me wrong, it is absolutely horrid, unwatchable, but it's also geniunely harmful and insulting with the messages it promotes. But I was geniunely surprised at all the love this movie recieved on social media, however, I am glad that there was an equal, maybe even bigger, number of people who critique it for the way it handles themes presented in it.

I am known as an avid distaster of romantic media amongst my friends (except for romantic songs, I love those), however there's been times where I actually enjoyed such pieces of entertainment. Those include: The Fly (the 1986 adaptation), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), The Shape of Water (2017), Across the universe (2007), Scott Spencer's novel Endless love (it's a shame both film adaptations suck donkey balls), Stardust (both Neil Gaiman's novel and the 2007 film adaptation), The Princess Bride (the William Goldman novel and the timeless 1987 classic film version), Anita Blake, vampire hunter series by Laurell Hamilton, Southern vampire mysters by Charlaine Harris (and their HBO TV series from 2008) amongst a few others.

As you can see, I'm clearly not the type for conventional romance plots. So why did I watch this movie?

To tell you the truth, I would have avoided it like the plague if it wasn't for our Croatian teacher deciding that we should watch a movie in class one day. So she logged onto her Netflix and randomly selected this creation (I refuse to call it a film). I was deeply aware of the bad press this one got, having watched a wonderfully extensive video essay on the topic I randomly stumbled upon on Youtube a week prior. Before that, my exposure to it was mostly through Facebook posts calling it a wonderful and profound romance movie, but I'm not sure how was this incredibly unsputle propaganda piece able to fly over their heads so easily.

In case you're interested, here's the video essay I watched, some things that I'll share in this review will make far more sense if you watch it.

Ok and now onto the actual thing we have here...

(1) The Ridicolous Propaganda

Wow, I can't believe this is the second review in a row I've been writing that discusses political propaganda in media.

This time we're dealing with the good old glorification of the US military. Ok, ok, I'm not gonna go all "America sucks" on this one, because there have been some American military films I had fun with (for example Battle: Los Angeles) and I don't believe showing your military in a positive light is a bad thing. However, most movies I enjoyed that do this aren't meant to be taken too seriously, they're usually dumb action flicks you put on when you want to switch your brain off, have some popcorn and watch things blow up. They're simple, but they're fun after a long day at work.

However, this one decides to something worse. It completely ignores all the negative aspects of it as an institution (for example, completely ignoring the deaths and injuries at Camp Pendelton) and showing the criticism of it as an irrational and troubled mindset that needs to be changed (something that happens to two different characters over the course of the runtime).

Another big issue I have with this film is the normalisation of racism and sexism.

Lines like To hunting down some goddamn Arabs! and So we're good enough to fight for your ass, but not good enough to touch it? are running rampant throught the film. Naturally, our lead is upset at them, however, as soon as she steps up to the people who say these lines, she's immediately knocked down and flatout gets told that think about their true meanings.

Instead of refusing to bow down and contiuning to fight the propaganda, our lead (whose shown to be an avid supporter of the lgbtq+ community, feminism, the BLM movement etc., on various occasions throught the film) decides to be an obediant little wife and do nothing about it, eventually seemingly becoming one of the supporters of such mindsets herself.

The overall message of the flick seems to be that women should never have their own point of view and have to believe and agree with everything their husband says, even if his mindset is incredibly flawed and biased.

The fact that this movie was mostly marketed towards the impressionable crowd of teenage girls, makes this not just said, but downright disgusting, moreso than most horror movies I saw.

(2) Objective negatives

Apart from being a disturbing propaganda piece, this movie is also pretty bad when looked at objectively.

Let's start with the acting.

It's awful on all fronts (pun fully intended). There's no chemistry between the actors, ergo none between the characters either. I can't buy into the friendships, romantic relationships and familial drama if these people don't feel like friends, partners or family members, but rather random people who are meeting each other for the first time. I'm really surprised that they managed to pull in Alex Wolff, who starred in such amazing films as the true crime film Patriot's Day (2016), biopic My friend Dahmer (2017) and the supernatural thriller Hereditary (2018). But, every actor can fall into a bad role once in a while so I don't hold a grudge against him, and atleast his performance is corny enough that it makes it feel like he was trolling the crew, kind off in the same way Robert Pattinson did in the Twilight franchise and Dakota Johnson did in the Fifty Shades trilogy. He's a shining star in the Lovecraftian void that is this production.

A big focus of the film is put on music. Our lead, Cassie (who my brain for some reason keeps calling Hailey), wants to be a singer, so this is understandable. It's never a full on musical, but there's a couple of musical numbers thrown in there so that the audience doesn't go Oh yeah, she sings in this. So the music should be either good or bloody amazing, right?

If there was to be a definition of wrong, this sentence would be it.

The music is barely passable. From a poorly perfromed and generic sounding cover of Sweet Caroline in the beggining, to four original compositions the replays of which are scattered throught most of the film's soundtrack. I'll just focus on one of them because it's not only played throught 50% of the film's runtime is Come back home written by Sofia Carson, Daniel Creen, Eren Cannata, Skyler Stonestreet and Justin Tranter and perfromed by Sofia Carson (who, I forgot to mention, plays the film's lead). Netflix really wanted this song to blow up that they made an entire music video for it (reminds me of how another movie I'm not fond off, 2016's musical comedy Sing!, really wanted their cover of Jeff Bluckey's Halleluyah (which is one of my favorite songs) to blow up, so they pushed it everywhere in the promotional material, along with their cover of Nicki Minaj's Anaconda for some reason). But let's get back to the actual song.

I'm off a stance that if you push for something, to be the next big thing, especially when it comes to music, it means that you don't have much faith in it and are hoping for it to blow just by ratings count alone. It's certainly the case here, with the song, whilst being widely broadcasted, is the most generic, bland and unoriginal piece of music I heard in a while. Now, art doesn't have to be original to be good, but this is the same song we heard a million times, it has nothing to show for itself as a piece of the music industry.

I have no more energy to talk about this film, it just sucked out so much precious time and feel out of me. I rarely get geniuenly angry at a piece of fiction, but this one tore my whole being into shreds. My frustration cannot be put into simple words so I'll just end the review here.

Do I reccomend it?

No, not in the slightest.

Apart from being a poorly constructed film, it promotes vile messages that any rational person should disagree with. It's just a horrible, horrible depiction of all of the presented themes and I was in a state of physical pain whilst watching it. If they ever invent the Neurilizer I'd gladly use it to forget this one.

Trailers: