A former winner of the vaunted Tribeca Film Festival’s grand prize way back in 2006, this raw, unconventional Iraq War documentary has now been given fresh new life on DVD by Kino Lorber.
Ostensibly directed by Deborah Scranton, The War Tapes is actually the visually chaotic but powerful and thought-provoking result of three active-duty US soldiers being given hand-held cameras to film their everyday experiences on the front lines circa 2004, not long after George W. Bush strutted onto a battleship and arrogantly declared “Mission Accomplished” and that the “battle of Iraq” had been won.
The cameras were given to three members of the New Hampshire National Guard, and their footage of life on the Iraq front lines is intercut with interviews and a host of other assorted images—all edited down to a final product that makes for a fascinatingly provocative film despite the avoidance of a single coherent take on the war itself.
This trio of amateur filmmakers in the field Scranton chose all see the war from different points of view: one is a zealous patriot at the beginning whose support for the war diminishes over time, another has a liberal, literary bent, and another is a Lebanese immigrant who speaks Arabic and has skeptical views of the war.
The guardsmen’s mission is to protect vehicles affiliated with disaster-capitalist firm Halliburton (remember them?) as they go about whatever dodgy business that corrupt company participated in on a daily basis. Which is to say there’s no lack of white-knuckle action in this film, as New Hampshire’s finest find themselves speeding down some of the most dangerous roads in the country, dodging exploding bombs, whizzing bullets, and obstructive traffic. The next thing you know, they’re on an intense counterinsurgency mission in notoriously volatile Fallujah where anything could happen at any moment (and often does).
Some of the most emotionally fraught moments in the film, however, come in the footage of the guardsmen at home, trying to make sense of their experiences in Iraq and precariously attempting to navigate their uncertain postmilitary civilian lives.
Although the Iraq conflict is long over, there’s still a lot to be gleaned from The War Tapes about the physical and psychological traumas of modern technological warfare and why we will probably never be able to stop blundering our way through futile, nihilistic wars. Recommended. Aud: C.
Included in our list of Best Documentaries 2021.
