First and foremost, if you want escapism in your movies, this one ain’t for you. Right now, there’s a war going on in Iraq with thousands of soldiers in harm’s way, and you’d better steer clear of the theater if you want to forget that for two and a half hours (To its credit, though, the movie is absolutely and 100 percent apolitical).<\/p>\n
However, this movie does have one thing that is seldom found in modern escapist action movies: suspense. In this movie (and in real-life Iraq and Afghanistan, for that matter), any schmuck with a cell phone could set off a bomb at any time. Anyone with a vest or a jacket could blow up without warning. And no matter how many snipers are taken down, there’s always the risk that one is still left. Oh, and the culture gap — even with a translator — can be fatal.<\/p>\n
The narrative does drag in spots, though. There was a brief subplot, for example, where our protagonist sets out to find who was responsible for turning an Iraqi boy into a bomb (yes, you read that right). While I can understand the frustration he has, his scenes with the boy were wonderful and the investigation was relatively brief, I still feel like the pacing could have been improved with minimal damage to the narrative if those scenes had been cut. Also, there’s a point where the squadron is called in to investigate a bomb scene in the Green Zone. This is followed by horrific imagery that, while warranted, went for about a minute too long without advancing the story. I also think that the time between the climax (an especially nightmarish suicide vest scenario) and the final cut to black could have and should have been tighter.<\/p>\n
Still, I’ll take suspense and raw emotion over masturbatory CGI any day. While this film is not for everyone, I’d certainly recommend it to anyone who wants to see how a true filmmaker gets an audience to care and question whether or not a fictional character lives or dies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An apolitical, unflinching and tense front-row seat at the frontlines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":734,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arthouse"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3uOb3-8","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moviecuriosities.fmuk.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moviecuriosities.fmuk.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moviecuriosities.fmuk.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moviecuriosities.fmuk.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/734"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moviecuriosities.fmuk.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/moviecuriosities.fmuk.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":182,"href":"https:\/\/moviecuriosities.fmuk.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions\/182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moviecuriosities.fmuk.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moviecuriosities.fmuk.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moviecuriosities.fmuk.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}