Surprised there isn't a thread on this already (or maybe it has come and gone) but without the politics in the RR, I figured this would be something many might have seen by now. I went and checked it out because of the horrid reviews every gave of CotT... Action bits were fun, the acting was decent and I definitely got a sense of the on the ground frustration and confusion of urban combat actions. Many of the panorama shots were great, certainly what one would expect of being in Baghdad during the war. However; there were times when I was a little annoyed with what was going on on-screen - there's a bit with a million dollars being brought into a prison where nobody batted an eye at its existence. Part where an Iraqi national is brought into the main complex without anyone checking for IDs or the like. Lastly the politics were too blatant and not very nuanced at all, basically a hindsight view of what went wrong without actually saying that the proposed solution (in the movie) was/would have been any better. For the majority here, I think if you can ignore the political message (at least in the last 15-20 minutes of the movie) it would be a pretty decent renter.
Pretty mediocre overall. I don't like the shaky-cam action where you can't tell what's happening. Some aspects of the political power-struggle were interesting, but the whole thing was too timidly handled and didn't break any ground. (I don't agree that you can or should "ignore" the politics of a work like this.) The Iraqi Shi'ite veteran - "Freddy" was the most interesting and sympathetic character.
I haven't seen it, but as for nobody batting an eye over a million dollars - there was a shitload of confiscated/found/extorted money loose when I was in Iraq. I'm sure I mentioned (previous threads) about some soldiers (young grunts I think) trying to "wet their beaks" by taking some money off a huge stash. It was all sequentially numbered, but they took it from THE MIDDLE instead of either end. Thus, a red flag went up immediately and the jig was up. Even Saddam's kids went on a bank-robbing spree during the early chaos of the fall of Baghdad! It was like the wild west! Then there's the "gold bricks." Early in the war a truck was caught taking gold bars to Syria. It was pretty big news, no cover up or anything (at the time.) Then the US Army retracted the claims, saying they were lead bars just painted gold. :easterundecided: Riddle me this: the lead bar market is apparently quite lucrative, enough to risk getting killed by coalition forces. But the lead is so valuable, you paint it gold to look like......gold? :easterundecided: Yes, just imagine the joy of any thief stealing gold bars and scraping away the paint to discover the real jackpot....lead! You can melt it down to make fishing sinkers, I guess. :eastergrin: And yes, I'm sure there was much "beak wetting" with the gold.
Well in this instance they were taking money into a prison and were searched by the prison guards, who naturally found it (they weren't trying to hide it). Nobody even questioned the appearance of a million bucks going into a prison to be used as an interogation/reward/bribe thing. So either it was sloppy, sloppy plot *or* it was something of a norm at the time. Either way I'm a bit grrrrr about how it was handled in the film. It almost has to be ignored; else the ending of the movie is either too Milquetoast or just a bad political statement (depending on one's views). In my opinion the movie spent a great deal of time trying to show the political views of the producers; but not really any time explaining how those would have been worthwhile in the end. (Sure if the Ba'athists had been allowed to remain in power there wouldn't have been an insurgency...right...) Anyway, like I said, probably a decent enough renter for anyone who's involved themselves in Iraqi-related threads.
I liked it. Dealing with the fuckup the US made by not working with Saddam's people after the invasion was good.
Why do there have to be easy answers? Anyway, I'm not sure that the views of the producers are quite so obvious. My own view is that expressed by Freddie, the Iraqi translator who said "It's not up to you to decide what happens here." It's clear that they have some sympathy for this.
I think they do make a very good point about the Ba'athist Party being pushed out. Of course we don't actually KNOW what happened, but common sense tells you if you push out the strongest political party and refuse to work with them they might just rebel.
