Review of Armadillo (2010) by Dj J — 03 May 2011

As a documentary Armadillo offers a more insightful view of ISAF's Afghanistan than in the similar film Restrepo, if only because the Danish platoon at the core of the film are more eloquent and likeable than the American troopers in the eastern valleys.

The Danes' six months in Helmand are punctuated with the usual patrols and tedium, but it's the tour's most deadly firefight that forms the heart of Armadillo, because the reaction set off a political storm in Denmark.

In extraordinary scenes, the platoon commander berates his men the morning after the patrol debriefing, saying that one of his men had called his mother on a satellite phone to tell her his version of events; that mother had called her MP and that MP had called the platoon commander! In the footage from the combat scene and the debriefing it's clear that some soldiers relished killing Taliban opponents, and the wording chosen by one in the debriefing gives the impression that perhaps the Taliban were shot when they had been rendered helpless by a grenade.

But the platoon insist 'you can't judge if you weren't there'. The fact that the documentary filmmaker, and by extension the viewer, was actually there filming make Armadillo an intriguing fragment of the real-life experience of soldiers fighting in Afghanistan, and an illustration of the possible pitfalls of allowing open access to the sometimes dirty business of modern warfare.