Witawas Levesque

The most realistic modern combat — you don’t know where you’re shooting, no confirmed kills, just you and your buddies trying to get out of hell.

I would rate this movie a solid C. As a first-generation Southeast Asian myself, I can relate to some elements in the film. However, certain aspects are not realistic. For instance, there’s no way a freshman Asian boy in high school would be hanging out with men in their 20s and partying with drugs and sex, this rare for full asian family. This is just a portrayal of very bad parenting. His mom gave him too much freedom to do whatever he wanted without clearly explaining the consequences. Chris’s character is portrayed as a weird skate kid who somehow ends up with a half-Asian girl, and she tries to kiss him in an awkward way. This part feels off—it’s a no-no to ever say something like “you’re cute for an Asian boy” in that context. It comes across as insulting. The movie does a good job of depicting an Asian kid struggling to adapt to American culture and feeling an obsession with being white. However, it doesn’t offer a solution to this problem. In real life, it took me about 3–4 years to understand American culture. It’s not about being white or half-white—it’s about understanding yourself socially in relation to others and the local subcultures around you. Many Asian kids have first-generation Asian parents who only know their own culture and have never experienced American culture in their childhood. This causes parents to mistranslate a lot of things. American families, by contrast, don’t usually have hardcore cultural standards like those found in Eastern cultures, as they tend to embrace individualism. A lot of Asian kids think that acting white will make them accepted into small social circles. In reality, these kids are just copying random American behaviors without truly understanding the cultural context. As a result, they end up combining a mishmash of personalities that don’t really align with the cultures they’re trying to emulate.