Taking liberties with the truth in the name of a story is nothing new. Where Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper goes wrong, though, is that the truth is a much better story.

In the film adaptation of US Navy sniper Chris Kyle’s infamous biography, what was in reality a nuanced, problematic war, is reduced to a good versus evil, hero versus villain account that plays heavily into American patriotism and islamophobia.

The movie inspired many islamophobic reactions on Twitter, with one user earnestly tweeting that it’s “[n]ice to see a movie where the Arabs are portrayed for who they really are — vermin scum intent on destroying us.” These sorts of reactions betray an extremely problematic aspect of the film: the star is deified not because he’s a proficient sniper, but because the people he kills are painted as enemies.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the portrayal of Kyle’s nemesis, Mustafa. Mustafa is an expert sniper on the enemy side that is picking off US soldiers left and right, making him Kyle’s prime target in the story. Eastwood plays this to dramatic effect, inciting a sort of showdown that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Marvel blockbuster.

This is the movie taking a small story approach to the war, focusing more on the plight of one soldier than the conflict as a whole. With content as delicate as the Iraq war, this is a dishonest approach to take.

The small story begs for a hero, a villain, and not much ambiguity: it’s less about delivering a complex depiction of events, and more about effectively invoking general narrative standbys; conflict, catharsis, empathy, and resolution. This is the category under which American Sniper falls — and taken at face value as a story — it does its job well.

However, there are certain expectations that arise when you’re adapting an autobiography, one of them being that the movie stays close to the source material’s nonfiction — something that American Sniper makes no indication against.

Kyle himself is a bit of a self-aggrandizer — he once claimed to have punched a former Minnesota governor over anti-war remarks, a claim that resulted in a defamation lawsuit He’s also had recorded cases of islamophobia: “everyone I shot was evil… They all deserved to die,” he says in his book American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History.

The source material, then, has a bit of bias. Yet you’d expect that a filmmaker like Eastwood would be able to squeeze a nuanced, critical approach out of it.

Instead of taking the source material and driving it towards a more critical approach, the film goes the opposite direction: it uses Eastwood’s storytelling abilities and capitalizes on the undercurrent of islamophobia in American mainstream culture to create a film that seems to encourage troubling stereotypes. The “evil” Iraqis get their just desserts; they are consistently and thoroughly placed on the wrong side of the fight. Kyle is the superman, stopping evil in its tracks one scope at a time. Even the opportunity to examine post-war PTSD is misused by Eastwood, with Kyle lamenting not the lives that he ended but the lives of his fellow soldiers.

In a sense, then, the movie stays true to the life and times of its source material’s author. And when it inspires some viewers to make islamaphobic comments, you can’t help but think that the film’s protagonist wouldn’t disagree.

Anthony Burton is a third-year student at Victoria College studying philosophy and English literature. He is the news editor at Victoria College’s The Strand.