For my Netflix junkies, this one’s for you. Purple Hearts 2022 is a movie that tells a story about two people who didn’t like each other at first, but end up falling in love. It starts with this woman Cassie needing healthcare but she can’t afford it. So she marries a soon-to-be-deployed marine, Luke, so that both of them can get military benefits. This new Netflix film got over 150 million views within the first 10 days and has stirred up lots of controversies.

One thing that got people riled up was the scene where Luke brings Cassie to dinner with other Marines and his friend makes an inappropriate and extremely racist toast about killing Arabs. 

Arabs are an entire ethnicity; that line was basically saying to kill an entire population. This military propaganda implies the people we send to protect our country just want to kill people of a certain ethnicity—which is completely false. That comment definitely hurt so many people. It’s disrespectful to all of our people serving this country. We need to respect our military and this scene is disrespectful to them and creates false perceptions of them.

Throughout the movie, Cassie changes her perspective and beliefs. During the movie, Cassie was exposed to a whole new military point of view because of Luke. During her speech to Luke before he gets sent to prison, she expresses how much she changed in her relationship. Cassie lowered all of her original standards that she started out with for love. Cassie actually had character development throughout the movie and was better for it.

Some people think that the movie’s overrated and that it’s a little extreme to call it military propaganda because of how Luke and his friends portray marines in a bad way. I understand where these people are coming from since this is a very sensitive topic. Luke was racist because he didn’t disagree with his friends about the racist comment at the dinner. No character development was involved and it was very unrealistic because they were trying to have the idea of opposites being attracted come alive but they never reached common ground and they just had to stand being with each other just for the sake of love.

Overall, this movie was very entertaining. I would rate Purple Hearts 2022 a solid 7/10. I would recommend this movie to all my rom-com lovers. So if you’re looking for a good movie to get emotional over this one is the one for you.