This is just plain lazy and ignorant story telling. Now don't get me wrong, I am against war, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars we have been fighting, I am very much opposed to, but this film attacks the soldiers instead of the real people to blame.
Angel Salazar has a small video camera and is recording things as they happen around him in Iraq, okay, not a bad start. He shows the way they live, sort of what their day to day life it like. After an IED is detonated and kills one of their own a few of the men from the platoon decide to go and rape a 15 year old innocent girl, and commit multiple murders. Then the rest of the film is dealing with the after math.
Every soldier in this is just despicable, which to me is just stupid, they aren't really like that. I'm sure there are some not so nice people over there, and I do believe actual murders and rapes have happened at the hands of US soldiers and its really sickening. What this film doesn't seem to grasp is that is what happens during war, not that that makes it okay, and not that we shouldn't have a problem with it, but the filmmakers make it seem like a uniquely American trait. They bring up Vietnam and even call Americans Nazis, that offends me personally. Brian De Palma wrote and directed this, and he should be ashamed, not only on the message but it is just horribly made. I was led to believe this was a documentary and it was far from it.
This kind of film making is angry and ignorant in the way it handles everything, from the way the characters talk, to their action and "missions" I had no idea it was so easy to just leave the base in the middle of the night to go raping. The story goes off on random and rather stupid rants trying to make our army look like the worst people in the world.
They bring up the thousands who have been killed at checkpoints and how only some of those turned out to be insurgents, but in the same breath talk about the rules of engagement. If a car doesn't stop at a check point, and gets past a certain line the soldiers are supposed to open fire. Is it really their fault if the person doesn't stop like they are supposed to, its their lives at stake, you would open fire as well if you thought the car speeding towards you and your fellow soldiers is filled with explosives. So for that little bit of argument I say "drop it, you have nothing, cant blame someone for not wanting to die"
The dialogue in this was very poorly written, from them using purposely brash names to just the small talk they went through was inane. The picture they paint of a US Army private is as follows: Large, Stupid, Racist, Ignorant, Angry, Rapists, Murderers, Trigger happy, and so on.
This story is one that people should know, people who are innocents are getting hurt and killed over there, but this was the exact wrong way to tell it. For shame De Palma, you took a rather delicate subject and turned it into the worst middle school kids film about how much war sucks. Sorry De Palma but its a little more complicated than that, you cant just slap dash this and think you are being prolific, or exposing some age old injustice the Americans are committing.
The way they depict filmmakers is just as stupid, this is the second movie recently that made a filmmaker into a leech, willing to latch themselves onto anyone that they could get a good story out of. I'm a filmmaker, a lot of my friends are filmmakers, and none of them are like this. Don't see this film, it was a really pathetic attempt, 3/10 stars.
Director: Brian De Palma
Starring: Izzy Diaz, Rob Devaney, Ty Jones, Patrick Carroll, Daniel Stewart Sherman
