Full Battle Rattle.

"Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss have assembled one of the most complete pictures yet to emerge of how an Iraqi town fragments into civil war, given the well-meaning but clumsy nudges of its American occupiers," writes Stuart Klawans in the Nation. "It is a work of direct cinema, which like all such documentaries demands to be valued for the intense labor that went into it: the weeks of filming, the months of editing. Paradoxically, though, Full Battle Rattle may also be the most conveniently made of all records of US military failure in Iraq - because everything you see in it happened in just three weeks, about forty miles outside Barstow, California."

Updated through 7/11.

"The film is freaky, amusing, and sickening in equal measures - part fly-on-the-wall vérité, part multiple-perspective Altmanesque tragicomedy," writes David Edelstein in New York. "Soldiers writhe on the ground choking in their blood, and then Americans and Iraqis pick themselves up and stand in line at ice-cream trucks; it's like Disney World with the fireworks aimed lower."

"The training village is like one of those living museums that recreate colonial times (which says something prophetic about the real Iraq, no?), or, as one soldier puts it, like a 'big expensive laser tag' game, but it seems more complex, like a very serious and well-managed game of Dungeons & Dragons," suggests Christopher Campbell at Cinematical. "On a second level, of course, the film is appreciable for what it says about the US military's involvement in Iraq. Contrasted with the rigorous psychological military training exposed in The Ground Truth, Patricia Foulkrod's excellent 2006 documentary about Iraq War vets, the exercises shown in Full Battle Rattle appear to be more fair, considerate and beneficial."

For Nick Schager, writing in Slant, "it's hard to see what concrete effect the simulation's contrived plots and characters (all crafted with attention to Hollywood-ish staging, storytelling and acting) have on actual battlefield performance. Moreover, it's tough to figure out what profound influence it even has on individuals, as Gerber and Moss's mini-portraits... are so hasty that any insight into role-playing as combat training exercise or attempt at educational cross-cultural dialogue goes by the wayside."

Update: "[D]espite its dark and often hilarious humor, Full Battle Rattle never loses sight of the fact that its subject is ultimately deadly serious, that every fake death in the simulation could be a real death on the battlefield, that the fake Iraq where the refugee role players spend their time is now more of a home to them than their own country." For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Gerber and Moss "about occupying this strange alternate reality, the war films that inspired them, and making films with dead people."

Update, 7/8: "With the release of Full Battle Rattle, the Iraq war documentary has entered its postmodern phase," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun, and "the resulting film, too hands-off in some respects and too constricted by its style, is oddly unsatisfying."

Updates, 7/9: "Let's keep this terse," begins Vadim Rizov at the House Next Door. "I talked with three other colleagues about Full Battle Rattle, and we all came to the same conclusion. To wit: it's yet another documentary where filmmakers are fearless about getting great footage but clueless about the form it should take."

"Like many of its predecessors, Full Battle Rattle takes no overt side in any arguments about the cause and course of the war," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Instead the film emphasizes the strangeness and complexity of the conflict, and also the endlessness that seems to be its most salient feature."

"The show ends with the American actors being sent to Iraq as the Iraqi performers prepare to entertain their next batch of recruits," notes J Hoberman in the Voice.' "The filmmakers alternate a few stories: American families are separated; Iraqi families are reunited in America.... One of the many surreal aspects of this fabulously disorienting movie: its representation of an Iraqi heaven that's an American hell."

"On one level, Full Battle Rattle captures one of the most peculiar (if conceivably most sensible) elements of the massive US war machine," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "On another, it simply illustrates that the distinction between reality and fiction - and the question of which one emulates the other - is never entirely clear."

Benjamin Strong in the L Magazine: "War is hell is theater seems to be the thesis, but then if you've been paying attention for the last eight years, you already knew that."

"Shorn of insight and any informative examination of what is, without argument, one of the stranger places on the planet, Full Battle Rattle remains little more than a curiosity," writes Chris Barsanti at Filmcritic.com; "its lack of the most basic context or reportorial curiosity keeping it a feature-length C-grade History Channel selection at best."

Aaron Hillis talks with Gerber and Moss for IFC.

Update, 7/10: "The cameras never take us to the real Iraq; we only go as far as the runway before a closing note reveals the fate of the group," notes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "Consequently, the movie fails to become a document of our time and settles for the dopey synthetic version instead."

Updates, 7/11: "Full Battle Rattle might be the first Iraq War documentary that liberals and conservatives could appreciate equally," suggests Steve Erickson in Gay City News. "The former can see an allegory for the war's absurdities in Medina Wasl, while the latter would be excited to see a group of cheerful Iraqis happy to collaborate with the US military and become American citizens themselves. While the filmmakers state that 'we both have strong and similar feelings about the war' in their press kit, they neglect to get very explicit about just what those feelings are - and that's problematic."

More from Noel Murray at the AV Club.

Posted by dwhudson at July 7, 2008 7:53 AM