Clint Eastwood's "American Sniper," which stars Bradley Cooper as real-life Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, made a surprise debut with a preview screening at the AFI Film Festival on Tuesday in honor of Veterans Day.
"The film tonight is about a veteran. A very unique person. And he became the most dangerous sniper in the history of the American military. And his name is Chris Kyle. And he has a very interesting story to tell," Eastwood told the audience before the screening,
USA Today reported.
Ahead of its Christmas Day opening, "American Sniper" is already the subject of Oscar buzz, with many saying it could net Best Picture, Best Actor, and more.
Eastwood, 82, won Best Director at the Academy Awards for 1992's "Unforgiven" as well as boxing film "Million Dollar Baby" in 2004. "American Sniper" will likely be his shot at the Best Director hat-trick.
Delighted by the surprise screening on Tuesday,
Deadline Hollywood wrote that the move was "a brilliant masterstroke in launching the film and an Oscar campaign."
Diving into the content of the film itself with a proper critical review, The Hollywood Reporter called the film, "A taut, vivid, and sad account of the brief life of the most accomplished marksman in American military annals, 'American Sniper' feels very much like a companion piece — in subject, theme, and quality — to 'The Hurt Locker.'"
"Starring a beefed up and thoroughly Texanized Bradley Cooper as we've never seen him before, Clint Eastwood's second film of 2014 is his best in a number of years, as it infuses an ostensibly gung-ho and patriotic story with an underlying pain and melancholy of a sort that echoes the director's other works about the wages of violence."
The movie itself is based on the eponymous 2012 autobiography of Chris Kyle, the Iraq War veteran with a record 160 confirmed kills, the most in U.S. military history. Kyle published the book before his death one year later at the hands a fellow U.S. military veteran at a Texas gun range.
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