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War As Acid
by Yahoo! Movies User (movies profile)
Aug 27, 2006
This incredible documentary about the horror and corrosive power of war was a real kick in the stomach. The amateur nature of the filming in Iraq by the three National Guardsmen and the simultaneous sound track guaranteed that it was as real as we're going to get (barring smell-o-vison). We can clearly never really understand what these guys experienced.
Moreover, the film itself made it clear that there was much worse stuff that we weren't allowed to see or hear (maybe because it was both horrible and seeing or hearing the extreme nature of the protagonists’ reactions would have alienated us from them).
“The War Tapes” was not Michael Moore-ish; it did not hit you over the head with a particular political position and demonstrated the incredible complexity of our current situation in Iraq. In the first instance, having broken Iraq, can we really leave without a program to fix it? On the other hand, my first allegiance was to the three young soldiers/cameramen (and the other men and women being sacrificed by our callous leaders); I wanted them to come home in one piece.
The cameramen/soldiers -- Steve Pink, Michael Moriarty and Zack Bazzi -- bravely exposed a great deal of their respective psyches. Somewhat conflicted and troubled before they went to war, they returned home severely wounded emotionally by their experience. For Bazzi, a Lebanese-born American who spoke Arabic and was able to have some real interaction with the Iraqi people, it seemed doubly difficult. Ultimately, however, of the three, he appears to have managed to maintain some perspective, but that may be because he was slightly better screwed together to begin with.
Unfortunately, the film made me see that there are different kinds of whole. Although Bazzi, Moriarity and Pink came home uninjured physically, all three are scarred (to a greater or lesser degree) for life by their experience. At least two of the three – Moriarty and Pink – will probably never have a “normal” life. It would be pretty hard for even the best adjusted person to make lemonade out of this particular lemon.
The movie also made me sorry for the Iraqi women and children and for the “TCNs” (third country nationals) who come to Iraq from poor countries to make money doing civilian jobs like driving the Haliburton trucks full of goods that we’re (over) paying huge amounts of taxpayer money for. The TCNs are truly cannon-fodder, somewhat like the teenage Iranian boys sent on foot to blow up the Iraqi mines in the war between those two crazed “nations.”
This was a wonderfully crafted and intelligent movie. |
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