Review of Three Kings (2011) by Asif K — 20 Nov 2011

I never get tired of this movie. Has to be the most complete and substantial black comedy since Heathers, if not going even farther back. And it has a tone all its own, which is very rare in filmmaking. It's lighter than the usual black comedy, and much more sober and matter of fact than the typical anti-war movie.

Strangely, it succeeds in being lighter than the usual black comedy by overplaying the silly moments a bit, and drastically underplaying the harrowing moments. You never really know when you'll hear a punchline pop out for comic relief, and you never know when a tense moment might suddenly get much, much worse in unexpected ways. This might be because they trusted their instincts and kept the pacing moving in surprising directions where they could, or it might be because they had a master plan to make you think more carefully about a subject you thought you'd already learned too much about. Or maybe both.

When Robert Altman made M*A*S*H, he knew his audience was saturated with media coverage of the Viet Nam war, and he knew he was in a position to show a huge cast of characters doing an unbelievable variety of different things tangential to combat, and still make a recognizable war movie. Of course, he was standing the Korean war in for Viet Nam, but the audience clearly saw the parallel right away, then as now.

Russell is in a similar position, except the level of media coverage is heightened with the first Gulf war. Audiences expected not only to find out far more about what was going on "over there" than, say, the WW2 generation, but they expected to know about it the day it happened. Today, in the agen of the internet, same-day coverage seems like a bit of a delay. But it says something about the way multimedia war coverage affects audiences that not one but two characters in this film are TV reporters, and one of them has a major role--she's recognized by American and Iraqi forces alike everywhere she goes.

Eventually, the presence of the media does affect the story in interesting tangential ways. But more than that, it serves to remind you how much happens in war when the cameras are NOT turned on, and that's where the great strength of this movie lies. We feel better-informed than ever about the conduct of combat in the world today, not least because so many momentous things happen live in front of cameras. From Viet Nam, we saw images of prisoners executed, monks self-immolating, children scorched and screaming--covered with napalm. From the first Gulf War, remote cameras too us down chimneys with bombs, and in a couple cases we even knew general mission objectives even before a given bombing run or other operation started.

And, as our operations wound down, we heard our president, George Bush the elder, call on the Iraqi people to rise up against Saddam. This is where this movie begins--cease-fire is declared, and troops are there to mop up the chaos. The first words of dialogue capture the confusion perfectly: "Are we shooting people, or what?" A recon unit is off-base. Spotting an enemy soldier armed with both a white flag and an assault rifle, our boys have to pause to make sure they understand their orders correctly before they proceed. Confusion unfolds dramatically from there.

It turns out that Saddam has stolen enormous amounts of wealth from Kuwait before retreating. It turns out that Iraqis assume American forces are on the ground with an eye toward taking over their oil reserves.. (We knew this, since the Iraqis lit their wells on fire to destroy access to the oil, and this was widely covered). But the Iraqis seem a bit startled at how hard they have to work to explain this to American soldiers.

Most importantly, we see horrifying images of war captured in the throw-away style engendered by the appetites of broadcast media for new stories. A TV reporter complains that environmental devastations are just old, tired stories--until she stop to really consider one of them. Rank-and-file American soldiers are perplexed at the sight of Iraqi soldiers destroying Iraqi civilians' food, but officers know the military is attempting to starve the civilians into submission. The veil comes up even higher, throwing a random civilian execution and cavalier gassing of the people at us. We find that the Iraqi military fear Saddam more than any enemy.

But, perhaps most surprisingly, we find that all Iraqis, military and civilian alike, remember far more vividly than Americans do that Bush had called on Iraqis to stand up in revolt against Saddam...just *before* withdrawing all American forces from iraq. The Iraqi military scrambles to discover American intentions in backing the uprising, but the rebels have already figured it out--we have left them "to twist in the wind," as one rebel leader puts it.

What begins as a lighthearted story of enterprising soldiers hot on the trail of filthy lucre turns quickly into an object lesson on the mercurial moralities of combat. Clooney gets a key piece of dialogue on this theme, and he hits it perfectly, using it to calm soldiers nervously anticipating a firefight. "What's the most important thing in life? Necessity." Necessities, and choices, and consequences all drive what follows--wealth, honor, family, loyalty, survival. Turns out that most of us want the same things in life, and don't need to kill anybody to get them. Most of the fighting and killing erupts after we're forced to choose sides. And the sides are controlled by the ones with most of the wealth.