MTV Presents STOP-LOSS

The war in Iraq and its after effects has hit the big screen with the newly released movie Stop-Loss.
A group of five Texas men return home after their tour of Iraq is finished. Staff Sgt Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) and best friend Sgt. Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum) have a big welcome home party because their duty to the war is finally over. King is honored with a purple heart and is now considered a decorated solider.
King and Shriver go to a welcome home party with the rest of their men to celebrate coming home, here the audience finds that they will no longer have to fight in Iraq and will be able to return to a home life after five years of service.
During and after the party, however, some of the soldiers start to act out of character. Tommy Burgess (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) starts a fight because a young man wants to dance with his wife, after getting drunk Shriver has a living nightmare that he is still in Iraq and shovels a hole in his front yard to hide, and King finds out he is being stopped loss.
When King goes to turn in all of his army equipment he is stopped at the generals office because he has been ordered to return to Iraq at the end of the month. King feels this is unfair and starts to challenge the order and this is escorted out of the office. He however gets away from his escorts by beating them up, steals Shriver's car and runs to his house.
King believes that the only way to not go to Iraq is to run away to Canada and forfeit his U.S. Citizenship. Throughout this trip King has two flashbacks about the war, the first was he imagined one of his soldiers drowning in the hotel's pool and he couldn't save him. The second was when some men broke into his car and stole his friend's purse. King found them on the street taking any possessions from the purse and King fought them, at first the three men were beating, no questions, but something clicked and he turned into a solider. He got all men on their knees and started yelling at them that they better start praying to Allah. The three criminals did not know what why he was saying this buy obeyed everything, even when King started shooting them.
Stop-Loss is not an anti war movie, it is pro solider. The messages seem confusing because it seems that director Kimberly Peirce wanted to stop soldiers who were being stopped loss, but then it seems that she wants more soldiers to go to Iraq. Even if Peirce's message got lost or mixed up during the production she still produced an excellent movie. The images and messages are very moving.