Gunner Palace (2004)

Pretty Good

For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

The one thing that strikes you more than anything else about the war documentary is how quiet it is. You would expect bombs exploding and bullets whizzing and shouts and screams, but they are all missing from this work by Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker.What remains is a constant recognition of the tension under which these soldiers are operating. Every moment, 24 hours a day, they are under threat. Everey step they take, every road they travel is fraught with danger from IEDs or motors or rifle fire.They are America's young; people who, for the most part, had no other options back home, and are now joined in a brotherhood that plays together, prays together, and dies together.It is a beautiful story of what our soldiers are going through.

This is not a good movie. The director's voice is obnoxious and he is constantly commenting on everything that is happening. The worst part is when he films his own home however many months later and says something to the extent of, "I'm home now and safe, but those guys are still over there risking their lives for our freedom blah blah." Very melodramatically. The background music is poorly produced hip hop by the soldiers in gunner palace and it really doesn't flow well with the rest of the picture. Gunner Palace is boring because the makers tried too hard to strike some sort of nerve and missed completely. The soldiers that are interviewed are not very bright and it's boring to watch unintelligent people talk. While imminent danger is nearby, they never seem to run into any problems throughout the film. I wouldn't call it a war story because where is the war? Might as well watch the evening news reporters stand around interviewing deployed soldiers. Gone are the days of filmmakers actually putting themselves in the sh#t to tell a good story. The makers acted like embedded reporters reporting on only one side of the conflict according to a bunch of nineteen year old morons. You should see Occupation Dreamland. The soldiers are more interesting and the audience gets a better feel for the way things are because Iraqi civilians are interviewed as well. The truth is that a lot of Americans do not treat the Iraqi people very well. It's difficult to do so when you have no idea why you are stuck thousands of miles from home in a desert and you are unaware of how you have been manipulated by your government to occupy a country under false pretexts. Does anyone remember Vietnam? Jesus. It's like it never happened. This movie sucked.

When I say that Gunner Palace should have been more, I don't mean that it should have been a better or more in-depth look at the lives of the troops in Iraq. Indeed, it is one of the closest looks at the daily lives of the soldiers over there that we have been able to see since the war started, but Director Michael Tucker has no idea how to get good interviews from the soldiers, and he messes it up even worse when he decides to talk. It's really sad that so many of the soldiers were handed this incredible opportunity to give a first account depiction of what their experience is like in Iraq and they use it to just screw around and act like idiots. Granted, a lot of these kids are barely out of high school, but I wish Tucker would have concentrated on the ones that had something important to say. I have all the respect in the world for these guys, but when it comes to getting an idea of what it's like to live in Iraq in a time of war, I'd be happy to stick to the guys that want to really talk about what's important, I could do without the interviews of the guys that just want to be funny.The guys that just want to be funny, of course, do not include the musicians featured in this documentary. Most of them are not making the kind of music that I am interested in but it is good to see that so many of them take their difficult experiences and channel it into something productive.The biggest problem that I had with this movie, however, is the goofy, melodramatic voice-over that Tucker put in every once in a while. Yes, it is some pretty dramatic subject matter, but the way that Tucker narrates this documentary reminds me at times of the way John Bunnell hosts World's Wildest Police Videos. He over-dramatizes everything in a way that just makes it sound goofy (I once saw an episode where a car running from the police went briefly onto the shoulder on a country road and knocked down a couple of pieces of rotted wood that were sticking up through the dry grass, and Bunnell chimes in, "the fleeing madman SMASHES through a wooden barricade!!!").Tucker doesn't fill his documentary with unnecessary hyperbole like Bunnell does, but rather with a misplaced theatrical performance as the narrator. Where simple descriptions would have been sufficient, Tucker opts for an added performance that just makes him hard to listen to. When it comes to a direct look at the lives of the troops in Iraq, I just don't think anything extra is necessary, but it seems that he concentrates more on this than on the really relevant things that are going on. There are some soldiers who do give important insight, but so much time is wasted and so much extra fluff is put in that it makes a lot of the documentary look like farce.

Gunner Palace is a unique film focusing on the war in Iraq and using new digital resources to produce an immediate unnerving front seat view. I have seen it two times and appreciate the discipline the filmmaker used to keep his political stance out of it. These soldiers are at risk doing their job at our government's request and we should hear them out. Their humor, music and camaraderie are what keeps them going and Tucker captures that. The frenetic pace and at times tense moments give the viewer a snapshot of what these young people lived through for over 400 days. It makes you mourn those lost like Ben Colgan. I hope this film gets folks talking and thinking about being more involved in war decisions that impact us for years. Go see this film.