Boots is a heartfelt twist on the military coming-of-age genre

style="font-weight: 400;">1917 from Sam Mendes – you can usually guess what you’re in for.

Depictions of the military on screen have long been used as a rite of passage that sees boys turning into men. These are stories about discipline, brotherhood and transformation rooted in a loss of innocence. The armed forces are often where individualism is left at the door, exchanged for a khaki uniform and army boots.

But what happens when this classic genre meets queerness, charming wit and an Eighties pop soundtrack? The Netflix series Boots delivers just that.

In Boots’s eight-episode first season, 18-year-old Cameron Cope (Miles Heizer) is introduced as your typical coming-of-age protagonist: a defenceless high schooler trying to figure out what to do with his life in between getting his head dunked in toilets by the class bullies.

So when his best friend, Ray McAffey (Liam Oh), shows him the military’s Buddy Enlistment Program, Cameron sees it as a much-desired chance to reinvent himself.

And anyway, “it’s like summer camp”, Cameron says assuringly.

But as soon as Cameron, Ray and the rest of the newest boot camp recruits pull up to what will be their military home for the next 13 weeks, Cameron quickly realises that he should have taken Ray’s advice and watched Full Metal Jacket before he arrived instead of catching reruns of Golden Girls.

To South African movie fans, the premise of Boots might sound familiar.

We’ve seen the story of a young queer man navigating military life before in two acclaimed Afrikaans films. First, the 2018 musical drama Kanarie and then Oliver Hermanus’s Moffie from 2019, both examining institutionalised homophobia in the context of the South African Defence Force during apartheid.

While Boots tackles similar themes of hypermasculinity and repression through Cameron’s perspective, the series, which is based on Greg Cope White’s memoir, The Pink Marine, takes on a more ensemble approach.

Cameron’s perspective as a gay teenager who has no clue what he’s signed up for – not to mention the illegality of being queer in the US military in 1990 – is complemented by those of his fellow recruits, who each bring to Platoon 2032 their unique backstories, personalities and motivations.

Every character is cast and performed with effortless authenticity, revealing exactly who they each are with no more than a facial expression as they line up alongside their bunks for the first time.

There’s the naive, charming husband who wants to make his wife proud, the dopey tough guy who loves being in on the action, and the set of rivalling twins who struggle to see eye to eye. Then there are the glimpses into the personal lives of the sergeants, humanising their stern and frequently torturous exteriors.

However, it’s unfortunate that these ensemble roles aren’t given the chance to develop into fully rounded individuals beyond their first impressions. 

They’re all underdogs in their own way, facing a system that threatens to break them down, whether through homophobia, racism or fatphobia, to name a few.

But, despite being well-intentioned in its representation of this range of military experiences, Boots seems to shy away from digging into the complexities hinted at on its surface.

Perhaps it was a deliberate decision to reflect the young men’s intense yet emotionally suppressed experiences, but the show’s uncertainty in how it wants to tell its story leaves characters feeling one-dimensional and subplots unrealised.

Erratic use of flashbacks and personified inner dialogue, together with an enthralling pace, makes for a scattered narrative. 

Nevertheless, Boots’s narrative structure doesn’t take away from how easy it is to fall in love with and root for its troop of characters.

Being based on real-life events, Boots resists being pigeonholed into a straightforward, predictable plot. The stakes of the Marine training itself may be high, but it’s really the characters’ relationships with one another that drive the show’s conflict and sustain its intrigue.

In its lighthearted scenes, especially those accompanied by comedically timed songs from the likes of