Soldiers get their say
Posted on Thu, Mar. 03, 2005
Dogen Hannah, Contra Costa Times
EARLY IN "Gunner Palace," a new documentary about U.S. soldiers in Iraq, filmmaker Michael Tucker takes his audience on a wild ride.
With rap music as a pulsing acoustical backdrop, Tucker focuses his lens on a firefight: Film frame jerking as he dashes for cover, Tucker grabs glimpses of gunmen braced in doorways along a nearly deserted, sun-bleached Baghdad street.
The battle is only the prelude. "Gunner Palace" captures more than the sights and sounds of combat that audiences are used to, as journalists armed with digital cameras and satellite uplinks ride into battle with troops.
Tucker's film, premiering as the Iraq war nears the two-year mark, chronicles the day-to-day existence of an Army unit in a dicey Baghdad neighborhood. From the humdrum and humorous to the terrifying and tragic, "Gunner Palace," at its heart, is the soldiers' story.
The movie, which opens Friday, is an 85-minute ride through the physical and emotional terrain the soldiers occupy. They patrol streets lined with roadside bombs. They lounge in relative safety inside their base. They ponder the violence that preys on them and Iraqis.
The film transports its audience half-way around the world, but the soldiers know their experience remains distant and elusive for outsiders. Speaking plainly and without bravado, one soldier says to the camera: "For y'all this is just a show, but we live in this movie."
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Dogen Hannah, Contra Costa Times
