Greenish light from night vision cameras open the film with several scenes from the first Gulf War in the beginning of the 1990s.  The scenes are taken from a targeting system that displays the elimination of targets such as buildings, machines, and humans.  Interjectionally, voices over radios frequently fade away within a static hiss, yet it is possible to make out what the pertinent information suggests while the sound of a soothing piano plays in the background.  A number of greenish combat scenes eventually lead the audience to Jack who is dressed in full combat gear while trying to help a little boy in the middle of the gunfire.  However, the boy has another plan, a plan that is about to bring death to Jack.

Jack recovers, and he is being discharged in 1992 due to his injury, as he is simply dropped off into civilized reality where people do not shoot each other.  He wanders along a road, a scene that brings back memories from First Blood (1982), where he encounters Jackie, young girl, and her heavily intoxicated mother.  Their car has broken down and Jack helps to get the car started again while Jackie asks him about his dog tags, which he gives to her.  But Jackie's mother, in her alcoholic haze, thinks that he is trying to touch her daughter inappropriately and drives off leaving him out in the middle of the wintry nowhere.  Soon after Jackie and her mother have driven off Jack hitches a ride with another person, which brings Jack on a confusing journey of amnesia and a police murder.

The authorities decide with the help of the military that Jack's damaged mind cannot be blamed and they sentence him to psychiatric care.  At the mental institution, Jack learns that he supposedly is delusional, yet somehow he knows that he is innocent.  Nonetheless, Dr. Thomas Becker (Kris Kristofferson) enters Jack into his own experimental care where he treats him by applying certain drugs and a straitjacket while placing him into a small drawer in the morgue.  If the viewer did not have claustrophobia, this first scene will likely produce claustrophobic tendency within the viewer, and if the viewer is claustrophobic this scene might be very tough.

The treatments with the straitjacket and the darkness of the morgue drawer bring to mind the notion of rigor mortis, which after a few hours enters the body following death.  Rigor mortis generates stiffness throughout the body that locks the joints in an immobile state that lasts for about three days.  Jack seems to be living through a fabricated death in complete darkness while only having his shocking memories flash by unpredictably.  After a couple of treatments, Jack finds himself in the middle of the winter standing outside a diner, unaware that it is the year 2007, where he encounters a grown up Jackie (Keira Knightley).

The camera work and the editing display exceptional talent, which enhances the element of darkness and the unknown.  Several scenes also have beautiful framing that together with the lighting capture the essence of a cold and sinister atmosphere at the mental institution.  The film displays great possibility, but something prevents the story from blooming.  There are parts of the film where it seems to go in one direction, but to suddenly change in mid stride. This generates a feeling of intentional deception, as if the filmmakers could not get the initial story going.  Instead the film must make a fresh start half way into the film.  For some this might be ok while others might feel cheated from the initial build up of the story, and then find that they are going in a different direction.  Despite what the audience considers, the story redeems itself in the end with a thoughtful and compassionate notion, but maybe not what horror film enthusiasts desire.  Overall, the Jacket offers an interesting cinematic experience, but it does not deliver a conclusive point or notion.  On the other side of the conclusive concept, the film does not leave one with much of an open-ended notion either, which ultimately keeps the film hanging in a cinematic twilight still waiting to be finished.

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COUNTRY

USA

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