Film Review: Armadillo

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Features

Published on Tuesday, 29 March 2011 06:56

Written by Marion DS Dreyfus

Directed by Janus Metz and Lars Skree
Written by Kasper Torsting

In February 2009 a group of Danish soldiers, accompanied by documentary filmmaker Janus Metz with cinematographer Lars Skree, arrived at Armadillo, a Forward Operating Base (FOB) army camp in the south Afghan province of Helmand.

The result is this tense, brilliantly edited, and visually sophisticated mirror of the psychology of young men in the midst of a vaguely defined war whose victims seem to be primarily local villagers and farmers. The gritty war drama justly won the Grand Prix de la Semaine de la Critique at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.

The handsome, tattooed and unblemished soldiers each try to come to terms with waking every day to the realities of being in a terrain of rubble, faced with lethal enemies they rarely see except via overhead drone transmission, green screen computer paradigms and the hasty exits of women and children fleeing their villages in advance of what they know to be gunfights ahead.

Through the early tedium of their military entrenchment, the nightly porn viewings and computer games, and the calls home to Mom on field telephones, to the steely tension of encounter with the enemy -- the time is marked off, titles indicating each month, but each day of continued breathing undamaged, alive, is a triumph against the inevitable encroaching odds.

Surreal scenes remind us that this is a civilian arena, as local children seeking sweets and leftover food rations pop up while the men pick their way through poppy fields ripe for opium manufacture, shooing them off kindly after sharing their food with them.

At one point, village Afghanis asked some of the men if they are Jewish or Christian. Momentary pause. "Christian." They ask: American? British? "Danish." The Afghanis are up on their PC bonus points.

Their panoply of gear is impressive, allowing to shout hectic instructions in the field of combat on helmet mikes, punctuated with noises and static-y orders, making the combat not only frightening but loud.

The commanding officer seems exceptional, articulately reviewing each expedition and engagement, praising the men when needed, upbraiding them when they are careless, reporting on the progress of med-evac’ed comrades back in Denmark hospitals.

Though the men are warm and comradely with each other, we rarely catch them openly admitting how existentially terrifying their days and nights are with lives constantly on the line.

They seem admirably prepared, but how prepared is anyone, in the end, to having an IED blow off a leg?

Metz and Skree repeatedly risked their lives to record the doings of young Danish soldiers situated less than a kilometer from dug-in Taliban nests. Nevertheless, the film provoked a firestorm of debate back in Denmark due to the controversial behavior of certain soldiers during one pitched shootout with Taliban killers.

Kinetic military activity tends to be messy, after all, and not subject to parental supervision.

For information visit www.armadillothemovie.com.

Marion DS Dreyfus
©2011

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