The Road to Guantanamo (2006)

To me, this movie is perfection.

So much average

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

The acting in this movie is really good.

Umm..How is this propaganda? It even showed American SOLDIERS WHO ARE RESPECTFUL AT Guantanamo bay (not all soldiers were assholes and treated the prisoners like animals) Secondly, this is based on real-life - The film portrays the accounts of Ruhal Ahmed, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul (the 'Tipton Three'). This is a very personal story – the story of four pretty ordinary, young Englishmen (of Pakistani background) who were in the were in the wrong place at the wrong time. It puts faces, personalities and stories to the so-called "evil-doers", the "really bad guys", as George W. Bush likes to childishly describe them. In doing so, it exposes the absolutely corrupt lies that we have been fed by our leaders.The four arrived in Pakistan for a wedding, not long after after the events of September 11, 2001. During their visit, they crossed the porous border of Afghanistan. Perhaps it was curiosity, or adventurism (the film doesn't fully explain). Whatever their reasons, the film is ultimately about the inhumanity and injustice that has been meted out while in the custody of US forces.The narrative takes the form of talking heads. Three of the young men (one is missing, presumed dead) speak intermittently as their experiences are re-enacted by non-professional actors in a documentary-like format, based on the accounts of the three. The realism of these segments is gripping, interspersed with Al Jazeera video footage from the time.Trapped in Kunduz province under attack by the Northern Alliance, the three men and other residents scramble onto a truck shared with Taliban fighters evacuating from the town. When this truck is intercepted, the occupants are all taken into custody. Thus begins the arduous road to Guantanamo.In the end, this story is not just about four young men. It is about Mamdouh Habib, David Hicks and a multitude of innocents who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Those without western governments to support them still languish under harsh conditions. It is a travesty that the Australian government is the only western government that continues to abandon its responsibilities to its citizens. As the film depicts, contrary to the rule of law, there is a presumption of guilt.For me, the constant inhumane interrogations, solitary confinements and beatings were reminiscent of the 1692 Salem trials depicted in Arthur Miller's parable The Crucible, or the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings (which inspired Miller's work) so artfully and powerfully depicted in George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck. Ironically, they depict the very type of pernicious activities that the US government was claiming to be saving the world from.In the context of current world events, this is an important film. I suspect that it will mostly preach to the converted, but hopefully it will find a wider audience. I found it compelling.

Short story, an utter disappointment. Long story, I was expecting a film about a group of obviously innocent lads caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, to be mistaken for enemy Taliban fighters.We start with them talking about going to Pakistan about wedding plans, and going to Afghanistan to "help". No mention of how 9-11 has kicked everything off in the country and war is coming, indicating that this is probably a VERY stupid idea at best, and aiding and abetting the enemy at worst.The lads hang around with a group of armed men, obviously not charity workers, who "tragically" (according to the way it is shown) get killed by air strikes and are all captured.I was nonplussed, these guys are obviously not giving a straight story. And then they get captured and interrogated. They aren't treated very kindly, but nothing serious. Certainly no back-rubs and massages, but not the torture I was expecting.All that happens now is they're kept in slightly uncomfortable conditions and get interrogated a bit more before being released. That's it. No brutal beatings, electroshocks, not even a friggin water-boarding! A guard even kills a spider to protect one of the prisoners!The fact that two of the lads admitted to going to jihad camps and learning to handle explosives and rifles shows the audacity of the stupid left wing filmmakers here. The last one refused to take a lie test, which shows he is clearly hiding something. And then that virtually nothing else happens to them, well I cannot express my opinions adequately. For those talking "evidence", the lads actions prove in spades their guilt. And they were not enemy combatants so it is hardly as if their rights were infringed by anything other than their own stupidity and further guilt.The only highlight of the entire wasteful film was the wonderful Riz Ahmed doing a rap number in his cage to the amusement of a guard, but that was because he was Riz Ahmed, not because of the absent quality of this pathetic film.

"None of us were ever told why we were in Cuba. We were told that they considered us 'unlawful combatants,' but whenever any of us asked what this meant they refused to give us a definition." - Shafik RasulThree young Muslim men journey from Britain to Pakistan to attend a family wedding. After the wedding they decide to travel to Afganistan, where they are arrested by American soldiers who, believing them to be "terrorists", ship them off to the detention camps at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba. The rest of the film consists of horrific torture sequences, the men abused for 2 years before being released without charge. Michael Winterbottom's "The Road to Guantanamo" plays like an angry sequel to his earlier film, "In This World". Both films use amateur actors, cinema verite techniques and sport an urgent aesthetic which resembles unfolding reality TV. There are differences, though. With "Guantanamo" Winterbottom splices interview footage and eyewitness accounts into his dramatic reconstruction of the trio's ordeal. These interviews are designed to validate the film's politics - its a heavy handed attack on the US, the Bush administration, the Patriot Act and the West's "war on terror" - but they also have the unintended effect of questioning the veracity of our eyewitnesses; their testimonies are as staged and self-consciously hyperbolic as Winterbottom's "reconstructed drama" itself.The film is at times gripping, albeit in a safe, agitprop way. The US soldiers come across as little Nazis, subjecting their victims to various torture techniques, beatings, abuse, racial/religious attacks (burning Korans etc) and a bevy of dehumanising techniques (refering to prisoners as numbers etc), all of which provoke suicides, tears and lots of physical and psychological trauma. And of course while all this madness unfolds, the words "Honor Bound To Defend Freedom" remain stencilled on Guantanamo Bay's cold walls. So what we have here is essentially, like De Palma's recent "Redacted", and to a lesser extent Assad's "Paradise Now", Winterbottom's "In This World" and Godard's "Our Music", the angry flip side to a wave of contemporary war mongering films like "World Trade Centre", "Blackhawk Down", "Saving Private Ryan", "United 93" etc. Where those films demonize the Other (Arabs, Germans, Middle Easterners, Africans etc) and glorify Americans and their quasi-religious sacrifices to the state's blood cult, Winterbottom attempts to humanise the Other. The irony is, this requires him to paint the American Empire as 21st century sadists. He has no inkling of the larger (psychosocioeconomic) systemic reasons for suffering.The question here is whether "Road To Guantanamo" is "bad art" because it engages in the same tactics as its opposition but applies these tactics to an opposing agenda (it portrays US soldiers as one dimensional villains). On one hand, a better director would engage with these issues with more objectivity, depth and insight, but on the other hand we have someone like George Orwell who swears by always siding with victims and underdogs. Psychologists once did an experiment where they showed participants two maps of Israel: one showing it as a large country surrounding the small Palestinian enclaves, and the other showing it as a tiny island in the middle of the hostile Arab world. In the "Palestinians as underdogs" condition, 55% said they supported Palestine. In the "Israelis as underdogs" condition, 75% said they supported Israel. In other words, you can change opinion thirty points by altering perceived underdog status. Winterbottom gains his 30 percent by decreasing the size of his underdog heroes and increasing the size of those who bully them, but of course historical truth is on his side. Which is why films like "United 93", "WTC", "Saving Private Ryan", "Black Hawk Down", "Munich" etc engage in what is called "passive victimhood" (ie – the feigning of being a victim or underdog). These films are all tragedies in which truth is skewed such that the "historical victim" is shown to be "the aggressor" and the "historical aggressor" is falsely shown to be either "the victim" or up against huge odds or facing some difficult mission. It's why we painted the Irish as devils for centuries and now as lovable rogues.Beyond this, the film touches upon a couple other themes – the fact that the majority of designated "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo have never been charged with any crime, the fact that more than two hundred and fifty prisoners have been released from the camp with no intimation that they did anything wrong, the sheer immorality and futility of using torture as a means of extracting information from someone who has no information to extract, the evils of Bush's "anti-terrorist policy", a policy which allows civilians to be imprisoned and interrogated without evidence etc etc – but it's the things which the film omits that are most interesting.For example, Guantanamo is the least shady prison in a web of illegal US prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and Macedonia (consider the case of Khaled el-Masri, who from 2003-2004 was erroneously held in Macedonia and Afghanistan by the CIA), and the film seems very embarrassed of the fact that its "heroes" travelled from Pakistan and into Afghanistan, Winterbottom attributing their journey to a mix up with a bus.This poor explanation as to why the boys were in Afganistan has led to critics supposing that maybe the trio really were attending "terrorist camps". What no one is brave enough to say is that with the adult world long discredited, such actions by them are perfectly understandable. Its no surprise, nor their fault, that alienated young Muslim's would go so far in an attempt to consolidate their own sense of identity. Such an attempted rites of passage shames Winterbottom, and perhaps the trio themselves8/10 – Didactic, visceral, simplistic.

Where do i begin? Three Pakistani descendant Brits go on a trip to Pakistan for a wedding,right? The story, based on true events, takes place a few weeks after September the 11th. Once they get to Pakistan, they decided to travel to Afghanistan,allegedly, to help, here are my questions:Q- Help how?A-They even said they had decided to stayed at the Mosque right after arriving in Pakistan because they couldn't afford the local hotels. How can one help anybody with no money, and no means of transportation? Q: How come they never become friends with anyone in Afghanistan?A- They said they didn't speak the dialect and yet, they were able to make travel arrangements, buy food, and find lodging but, when it came to talking to the actual fighters, well, they didn't understand the dialect,right!Q-: Why do they go to afghanistan during the outbreak of a major international conflict?A- There are very few groups people either naive enough or selfless do-gooders capable of such occurrence, Prists, red cross volunteers, or retards. They were none of the above, this characters, all had criminal records back home.United States was at war during this episode fellas, and I believe most of this people are nothing but gangsters, deserving encasement,and some even torture. American people are the most civilized group of individuals i have ever met,they listen, and more importantly, they respect the right to individuality. This Documentary is nothing but a self promoting biased vehicle for a liberal anti-American filnmaker, having said that, and assuming the innocence of this kids to be true, nothing would have happened to them, had the chosen to stayed home...This film is anti- American garbage! So much, I thought I was watching a war show on AL-Jaazeera television!