Every movie rewrites history. What American Sniper did is much, much worse. - Vox:
American Sniper has a problem. It's a movie about a black-and-white distinction between good and evil, but it is set almost entirely in the Iraq War, which can only be honestly portrayed in shades of gray.
Faced with a choice between altering its narrative
to account for that gray versus altering the facts of history, the film
chose the latter. It adopted an "honesty shmonesty" approach to the
war: in its retelling, Iraq was a fight of Good Americans against Bad
Terrorists, led by Chris Kyle, the Good-est American of them all.
The result is a sort of Hezbollah martyr video for the Fox News set; recruitment propaganda for culture-war extremists. In
the world of this movie, the Iraq war is an extension of the war on
terror; heroes with guns are our only hope of salvation; and anyone who
doubts that is part of the problem. And if the film's historic box office success and many award nominations are anything to go by, that propaganda is frighteningly effective.