Review of Gunner Palace (2004) by Nelson X — 07 Oct 2008

I first became aware of Gunner Palace through the incredible documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated, which exposed the battle Michael Tucker had to engage in to "save" his film from an R rating over naughty language.

In what proved to be a completely uncharacteristic turn for the MPAA, they repealed the rating and granted Gunner Palace a PG-13, deciding that the language was necessary for the film to serve its purpose of portraying the real lives of these soldiers.

It was a righteous cause for Tucker to engage in a fight for. He felt so strongly that his film was a realistic portrayal of the life of soldiers in Iraq, that it needed to be seen by a wider audience so they could better understand the troops fighting the war that America was engaged in.

I agree whole-heartedly. Tucker's film is a pretty incredible portrait of the 400 soldiers of occupy Gunner Palace and perform their missions out of it. What's more, Tucker's contrast in the film between Rumsfeld addresses which summarize what the media was saying about the troops, with what was actually happening at the time, serve as illuminating looks into the realities of overseas combat.

We should already know that what they're telling us is almost never the truth, and Tucker shows us. Perhaps most admirably of all, depending on your view of all this, Tucker does it without a significant political slant.

There's an air about the film condemning the deception of the media in portraying the battles and struggles of the troops, but there's no vehement anti-Iraq war message or preachy peace talk..

. everything we're told and made to understand about the conflict in Iraq is through the soldiers voices and contextualized through their struggle. All of these, you would think, would add up to a five star expose of troop life that cuts right to the issue of modern combat.

.. but it's not really. Gunner Palace ends up being good, but not outstanding. Everything feels too out of context. We are completely immersed in the life of the troops overseas, but we never get a true sense of their lives before or after, and we miss the human element.

Tucker does a good job of portraying the soldiers, but he doesn't really bother to show us how these men and women function as soldiers and American citizens. So we're left with a different commentary on the war from the perspective of the people fighting it, a necessary journalistic investigation, but one that is absent of any sort of conclusion or identification to the viewers, unless they happen to be soldiers, preferrably ones who fought in the same area.

It's more of a reflection on a trip than a cohesive essay film, and so we get a good sense of what the journey was like, but not how it effected anything. Gunner Palace seems to make no effort to avoid trivializing itself, and missed potential becomes its biggest shame.