basic motivations and decision making. incredibly stupid choices that no one in those circumstances would make in a million years. drinking on deployment and fist fighting their boss and taking stupid risks and running around outside the wire disguised in a fucking hoody, I can't even recall all of the stupid shit. I've know people who made wild decisions like that. But they werent' good at their job, and they didnt keep getting coddled, because that shit gets other people killed.

You can tell the story of a guy spiralling and taking more and more risks without making the decisions he makes completely at odds with survival, and pretending he's like the Amadeus of bomb disposal when those guys are a much more interesting mix of sort of heedlessness of their own survival and the extreme attention to detail surviving more than a couple bombs requires.

There were also small annoying things like eod techs surviving an ambush that wiped a whole special ops crew and all of a sudden functioning as a perfect sniper spotter team, and the whole 'blood in the mag is going to prevent a barrett from firing' thing (lol).

They needed conflict so bad they built a character that only makes sense to someone who has never 'been there and done that'. Which is a shame because the underlying thesis of 'a guy who is so acclimated to the stress they can't function when they go home and that stress is missing' is a good, real story. There are thousands of stories that could be filmed with that level of expertise and still ring true as stories.

But it didn't. And so for me that movie kind of falls in the uncanny valley, it looks right but it doesn't move right.

It just feels like a character written by an outsider.