Review: ARMADILLO - Hugely Impressive, Intelligent & Important

rating: 3.5

(Shaun's review from the London Film Festival re-posted as Armadillo begins a limited run in U.K. theatres from tomorrow. Also, look closely at the second quote on the uk quad poster above... yup, this one comes recommended!) In his introduction at the London Film Festival, Armadillo director Janus Metz told us, "don't enjoy the film", finding it inappropriate to say anything else. Armadillo may not be a very entertaining product, but it is intelligent and important; this gorgeously shot documentary, having the uncanny look of a fictional war-film, is hugely impressive not only because the crew lugged cumbersome HD cameras around a warzone and caught the stunning footage that they did, but because it cares not to politicise, but to humanise the situation on all sides. 'Armadillo' is the name of a British-Danish army base located in Afghanistan's treacherous Helmand Province. Installed there with a group of young army recruits for a year in 2009, Metz and his crew gathered an intimate chronicle of the soldiers' time at Armadillo, from their teary-eyed departures from their family, to their first glimpses of action on the front line. With the footage he has assembled, Metz has little opportunity to shy away from grim realities of life in the army, gathering uncomfortable and harrowing tales from the young soldiers. Early on a medic discusses an attack after which he had to collect the body parts of a comrade, disturbingly resolving that if you don't laugh you'll go nuts. In this rarely candid look at soldier mentality, it is devastatingly true. In his uncomprising assembly of this footage, Metz has captured the anxiety on all sides, perhaps most upsettingly for the soldiers' parents, one of whom has a call in the middle of the night from an unrelated party but expects it to be the notification of their son's death. Astounding it is that the field-based footage brought back is so well shot; a scene in which the soldiers are climbing a steep hill while a group of civilians approach them is as tension-filled as anything you're likely to see in a fictional depiction, with the soldiers fearing that a local might be concealing an IED. Metz cares not to moralise or cut the footage to assume any particular viewpoint, instead he merely conveys the confused mania of war, tragically capturing the anguish of the frustrated civilians caught between soldiers and the Taliban. The chemistry of the soldiers involved simply adds so much to the visceral experience, as they talk about what their parents think of their going to war. These getting-to-know-you discussions also remind us that many of the soldiers are still essentially kids, fresh to the field but also resultantly mired in ennui, with even the more well-adjusted ones desperate to see some action (a disturbing facet of war depicted in war classics from Platoon to The Hurt Locker'. Ultimately, the hardest test seems to be the downtime of war (Jarhead, anyone?). When the action inevitably arrives, the heart-stopping combat footage is only enhanced in terms of intensity by the frantic camerawork and snappy editing between cameras. The coverage converges with a pulsing soundtrack to blur the line between documentary film and fiction film, for this could so easily have been passed off as a fiction; it is that well-constructed and shot. There are a few unnecessary instances of overly obvious staging; the use of a snorricam has little purpose other than stylistic flourish, while a scene at the film's end of one soldier in the shower is evidently not spontaneous. Despite its depiction of these young soldiers as efficient killers, Metz also succeeds in depicting them as moral people who are trying to reconcile themselves; a mortar spotter's mistake kills a little girl, and it haunts him, while the others chime in, some relatively unaffected by the bungle, and others choosing to be philosophical in order to get by. We see them not only as haunted individuals but also surprisingly emotional and sensitive; the severe wounding of a colleague hurts them all, and after three soldiers from a local camp die, there is a heart-rending dialogue between one of the soldiers, Mads, and his girlfriend who, after hearing about this, seems at the end of her tether hoping he won't die. Surprisingly, the army are shown here as sensitive to the soldier's emotional needs; several soldiers are too upset to go out on patrol, and that is not a problem, which is completely surprising, and a side of military authority almost never seen. The eventual showdown, needless to say, is relentless; a miscommunication with the squad at one point leaves everyone in truly dire straits, and the messy result of that - where the soldiers were shown to be mildly disrespectful to some Taliban corpses - was blown out of proportion wildly when the footage reached the Danish news media. In lieu of this incident, the soldiers celebrate the skillful grenade kill that one of them scored, rather disturbingly speaking of it as one would of a video game. However, Metz carefully avoids glorification; he is simply matter-of-fact in a way that war fiction rarely is; this is real life warfare and it is not pretty. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DDuRraJbOg There is a palpable sense of brotherhood felt by the film's end, which is pleasantly touching given all of the horror shown over the previous 95 minutes. Yes, there are spanners in the works - chiefly the knowledge that someone has leaked the aforementioned incident to the press - but primarily the soldiers are portrayed on their own terms; they are doing a job, they are proud of what they do, and if you're going to point fingers, point them at the people wearing the suits. Finding a moving finale in the inevitable reunion between those who made it and their families, and a roll call explaining what they did following these events, we get a probing look at the make-up of one squad, and in observing everything they do - good and bad - we get a far more human portrait of a class of person too-often referred to as "grunts". Armadillo is released in the U.K. tomorrow.