The nightmare in Iraq
"Gunner Palace" takes the viewer as close to the actual experience of the Iraq war as anyone will ever want to get.
Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com
March 4, 2005 l As we see it in "Gunner Palace," Iraq is a bad dream from which American soldiers are struggling to awaken. What we witness of the war in this movie confirms all the things we've heard or read about war in general and this war in particular. It's tedious and terrifying; you never know who's a friend or who's an enemy; the streets are full of almost tangible malice; the days are enlivened by black humor and the extraordinary moments of insight that can emerge from young men facing the primordial dilemma of our species: Kill or be killed.
But it's one thing to read or hear those time-honored, even trite descriptions of combat life, and quite another to see it for yourself. For most of us, Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein's riveting documentary will be as close as we ever get to seeing the Iraq war as it has unfolded for the men and women on the ground. (It's certainly as close as I ever want to get.) For that alone, we should be grateful to these filmmakers. But "Gunner Palace" is more than cinéma vérité on-site with the U.S. Army's 2/3 Field Artillery at the garish, half-demolished former palace of Uday Hussein. It's also a nerve-jangling work of visual poetry and ironic juxtaposition, and a powerful human story of a group of brave young Americans thrust through the looking glass into a confused and confusing new reality.
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Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com
