6. 'The Road to Guantanamo' Documents Guantanamo Abuse...With Inappropriately Glossy Poster
Michael Winterbottom's incendiary docudrama about the treatment of detainees in Guantanamo Bay is a serious, critically acclaimed film on the subject, so I don't know why, then, the marketing department felt the need to resort to such cynically glossy means to promote their movie. It's almost as though they want to dupe audiences into thinking that it's a hardcore horror film, given the lack of an indication to anything else, and though one could argue that the poster wants to convey the hard-hitting nature of the film, the slick, stylised imagery doesn't really lend itself to that mode of thought. Would a minimalist, less-exploitative poster have made the same point? Absolutely. It's just a bit awkward, really; the film was widely acclaimed, and yet, resorted to some fairly desperate tactics to pull audiences in. On another note, the MPAA weren't too keen on it either (though one suspects there's a political agenda at play there...)