I wasn’t impressed with Tigerland. It wasn’t a very compelling movie. There were several scenes that just seemed false. There’s a scene in which two groups of soldiers run through a training exercise in the woods. There is a lot of cross cutting between the two groups and there is an effort to make the scene tense. However, these woods are not the jungles in Vietnam. There is no sense of immediate danger. Even when one of the men pulls out live ammunition and starts shooting, it still didn’t seem to help.
Another problem was the music. It began with a score that had a very eastern sound. Since this movie took place in an Army training facility in the U.S., it seemed false to have that kind of music in the soundtrack. Maybe all of this is intentional. Perhaps the director was trying to convey that falseness, the fact that this is all just play acting (i.e. the movie and the training facility). But why then am I interested at all in these characters or this story if it’s all just crap?