REVIEW: Danish War Doc Armadillo Is a Bit Too Glossy

The Danish war documentary Armadillo may be mostly business as usual as war documentaries go, but it does feature a landmark of sorts: This may be the first time a platoon gets in trouble for its actions because somebody went and told his mom.

Janus Metz's picture, which follows a Danish platoon during its 2009 tour of duty in Afghanistan, won the Critics' Week prize at Cannes last year. It also stirred up controversy in its home country for its depiction of soldiers' callousness -- emotional and physical -- in dealing with the bodies of the dead after a firefight with the Taliban. As the documentary shows, one of the soldiers reportedly relayed details of the incident to his mother back home. The platoon is then called to task, having to face the claim that its members "liquidated wounded people and piled up the dead, to take pictures of ourselves as heroes." Though Metz's camera does, in the picture's most affecting and disturbing sequence, capture the soldiers' cavalier treatment of enemy corpses, it doesn't depict the episode in a way that confirms the anonymous mom's charge.

That, of course, is part of the point of Armadillo: Civilians back home can never fully understand what a soldier goes through, or the specifics of whether or not a particular incident falls under the rules of engagement. We also know that in the chaos of combat, soldiers can't always see those specifics clearly themselves. That stress and confusion can trigger -- but not excuse -- atrocities and inhuman acts, along the lines of what we see here.

In other words, Armadillo tells us lots of things we shouldn't be so naïve as to think we don't already know. Maybe we need to see these things again and again, just so we don't lose sight of the costs and risks of the wars in which American and European soldiers are currently engaged. (It also bears acknowledging that it's not just American soldiers who commit atrocities during wartime.) But for combat documentaries to do any good, they can't engage in the faux-naïvete that Metz indulges in here. He opens his movie by introducing us to a group of impossibly young, innocent-looking soldiers as they say good-bye to their families. Later, we see the soldiers watching porn and listening to heavy metal. We hear them talk about what they've been brought to Afghanistan to do. Some of them refer to it as a peacekeeping mission, but they all seem to know their real purpose, and they reflect on it with both eagerness and dread, saying things like, "I'd like to see some action; I don't know what my reaction will be."

Act II: The soldiers become more jaded. They've learned -- light bulb! -- that they can't trust the Taliban. Some of them are wounded in combat. One of them, wading through a muddy stream, says, "Welcome to 'Nam." Armadillo is so by-the-numbers it almost feels scripted. While it's true that people under great stress often speak in clichés, you start wondering if these young soldiers are taking cues from other war documentaries they've seen, as much as from their own experience. The dialogue in Brian De Palma's 2007 fiction film (based on a true story) Redacted felt more natural, and more raw, than almost anything these soldiers say in Armadillo.

The picture has none of the immediacy of recent war documentaries like Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington's Restrepo (which was filmed in another part of Afghanistan in the same year). Part of that may have to do with the picture's look: Armadillo is beautifully shot. Too beautifully shot. During the firefight sequences, the camera is suitably shaky, Chaos 101-style. But mostly, these soldiers are so artistically lit, they look as if Roger Deakins had been on the scene.

The movie's final image is that of a soldier who's returned home, stepping naked into the shower. The camera lingers on his muscular, tattooed, battered body before closing in on the anguish on his face. Armadillo is so real, it follows its subjects right into a properly lit shower. War documentaries serve important functions, among them keeping those of us at home cognizant of the suffering of both civilians and soldiers during wartime. Facile documentaries like this one, no matter how sincere their intentions may be, don't help the case.