Twenty years have passed since the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003. Like other American wars, the experience in Iraq prompted a significant body of cinematic work depicting and analyzing the conflict. Here is a look at some of the most notable films on the Iraq War.
The Hurt Locker (2008)
Hurt Locker remains the greatest movie made about the Iraq War, and it’s hard to imagine another film surpassing it in the near future. Unlike most Hollywood films, the plot is secondary to the film’s action but provides enough of a structure to prevent the audience from losing interest. It shies away from presenting a grand narrative of the war and shows the experience of the soldier on the ground. It neither glorifies nor demonizes the war, but treats the human experience of it with understanding. The Hurt Locker is what art is meant to be, allowing viewers to draw their own conclusions instead of forcing a particular viewpoint on them. Sure, the movie makes some logical leaps, and the characters get themselves into some unlikely scenarios. But as mainstream Hollywood action movies go, it’s about as realistic as they get.
American Sniper (2014)
It’s hard to hold back your tears at the end of American Sniper, with its tragic ending crashing unwelcome into a story of redemption. A fiction writer wouldn’t have dared. The injustice of it all is captured, perfectly and respectfully, by Clint Eastwood and Bradley Cooper. There isn’t much to say beyond that you should see it, and soon, if you haven’t already. Film snobs may see it as one-dimensional, and a story of a real-life hero may seem cheesy in our cynical age. Like The Hurt Locker, the film is not about the politics of the war, but rather the experience of those fighting it. But to separate the characters from the fact that they had a job to do, one fraught with politics, is impossible. At least one sneering critic saw it as an attempt “to turn the Iraq war into a saccharine, almost PG-rated two-hour cinematic diversion about a killing machine with a heart of gold.” But it’s not about whether or not we should have been in Iraq, it’s about those who went regardless of what they thought of the war. That they were given an impossible task is part of the tragedy of Chris Kyle’s story.
Shock and Awe (2017)
Shock and Awe is a missed opportunity. It had a great story to tell, and did so in a spectacularly poor fashion. The film centers around the team at Knight Ridder, a media company that owned 32 papers around the U.S. before being bought out by McClatchy in 2006. Leading up to the Iraq War, the reporters at the paper — Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, along with editor John Walcott — picked up on the story that the U.S. was going into Iraq on faulty intelligence. They were talking to mid-level experts who were rightly skeptical of the Bush administration’s case for war relying on a presumption of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq’s possession. Judith Miller, whose coverage of the war ended her career at the New York Times, later acknowledged that Knight Ridder reporters were the only ones who got the story right. Given the high-profile cast (Rob Reiner, Woody Harrelson, James Marsden, Tommy Lee Jones, Jessica Biel), the movie is shockingly bad. The dialogue is atrocious and insulting to the viewer’s intelligence.
The worst moment may be when James Marsden, playing reporter Warren Strobel (now at the Wall Street Journal), goes on a first date with the accountant, played by Jessica Biel, living across the hall at his condo complex. Biel opens the date saying: “So what was the most embarrassing thing you did to prepare for tonight?” Awkward pause. Biel continues: “Alright. I will admit that to prepare for tonight I did kind of a cram session on Iraq and the history of the Muslim world.” She goes on to give a parody of the one-paragraph version of Middle Eastern history, just so the (apparently uneducated) audience is up to speed on why going into Iraq was such a mistake. In an earlier scene, several characters give an equally simplified history of neoconservatism, each casually sharing a piece of information to fill in the history throughout their conversation. Each character apparently knew some oddly specific pieces of information that fit perfectly with the other oddly specific pieces of information shared by their colleagues that their colleagues implausibly didn’t know, given their other detailed knowledge of neoconservatism’s history. It is unfortunately emblematic of the dialogue throughout the film.
The film’s inadequacy is a shame, because it had quite the story to tell. Knight Ridder’s reports managed to do what escaped their competitors at the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and Fox News. They managed to properly dig into the story and come up with information that the contradicted the Bush administration’s case for war. In retrospect, they were absolutely right; not only did the administration’s case for the presence of WMD turn out to be wildly incorrect, Iraq’s own modern history doomed it to chaos when Saddam Hussein was removed from power without a viable alternative to put in his place. The story of Knight Ridder is indeed the stuff of Hollywood gold, but director Rob Reiner failed massively to deliver.
Fair Game (2010)
More adept as a film than Shock and Awe but in a similar vein, this film about the Valerie Plame case should be extremely uncomfortable viewing for supporters of the war of all political stripes. History may still judge the Iraq War as a largely misguided but well-intentioned effort, the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of the Middle East rather than ill intentions. The Plame case challenges that assumption, however, and the demonization of Plame and her husband Joe Wilson is impossible to defend, regardless of one’s views of their intentions as they spoke out against the war. It’s hard to see the case as anything other than a bureaucrat trying to tell the truth and being impugned by an ungrateful government for her efforts. There is, however, something slightly off about a film making such a clear black-and-white distinction between the noble Plame and Wilson on one hand, and the evil Bush administration on the other, when that seems to be exactly the type of thinking that led to the Iraq War in the first place.
Green Zone (2010)
Paul Greengrass teamed up with Matt Damon, reprising their work together on several of the Bourne movies, to make an over-the-top Hollywood version of the early days after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. The movie is allegedly based on Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City, but it in no coherent way represents the book, which is an account of Chandrasekaran’s reporting for the Washington Post from Baghdad in the early days of the war. (For what it’s worth, the book is also disappointing and underwhelming.) The movie has some thinly veiled caricatures of real figures from the Iraq invasion like Ahmad Chalabi but is otherwise a work of Hollywood fiction. Greengrass clearly wanted to make a Bourne-style movie, but set in Baghdad, making a political case against the war. He tried too hard, and the effort failed. It’s not bad enough to invite derision, nor good enough to have any insight into what went wrong in those fateful early days of the war. Instead, it’s mostly forgettable. It confuses hyperbole for insight, despite interesting material to work with in the Curveball case. Better to spend a few hours watching Greengrass and Damon make magic in the Bourne series instead.
Redacted (2007)
Brian De Palma’s film based on the Mahmudiyah incident, in which American soldiers raped a 15-year-old girl and murdered her and her family in 2006, is unsettling to watch. It is the Iraq War we want to pretend didn’t exist. It is the dark underbelly of the war, in which policy-makers put soldiers in the middle of an unwinnable war, but where the war’s moral failings were not just at the top of the chain of command. It is a picture of ourselves that we don’t want to see. The film isn’t perfect and has plenty of shortcomings. Some criticized the film for not acknowledging that those responsible for the crimes were charged and convicted, but the point is not that the crimes were committed with impunity, but rather that they were committed at all. They need not be representative of the war in Iraq to be significant.
De Palma uses his film to explore both the nature of violence in war as well as the nature of media. Every scene in the film is viewed through some form of media present in the film itself. A soldier records his day-to-day interactions as part of a film project to help him get into film school. A French documentary crew makes a film about a checkpoint manned by U.S. soldiers. Local Arabic-language media covers violence perpetrated by the U.S. We watch events through security-camera footage, web chats, deposition videos, and terrorist propaganda videos uploaded online. The film is meant to feel like a documentary. The effect is heavy-handed at times, but almost 15 years later the saturation of media at every event, where people record the smallest thing on their cellphones, has become more pronounced. Is the camera a neutral observer? These questions go beyond just the Iraq War; just ask the kids at Covington Catholic.
In the Loop (2009)
Before there was Veep, there was Armando Iannucci’s In the Loop (and before that, the series The Thick of It). Iannucci’s work gets at a funny truth: that decision-makers in D.C. and London are more easily caricatured as vain buffoons than sinisterly effective operatives. In other words, the bumbling characters of Veep are more representatives of the Anglo-American political class than the shadowy characters of House of Cards, a truth obvious to anyone who has dealt with them extensively.
The cast of characters making up In the Loop occasionally seem like they have principles, but self-interest always wins out when push comes to shove. The film’s setting is obviously the run-up to the war in Iraq, though the name of the country to be invaded is never said, and the timeline doesn’t match up perfectly (there wasn’t Facebook or YouTube when we invaded Iraq, unlike in the film). Throughout the film, the British government plays catch-up, trying to figure out what the Bush administration (never named as such) is cooking up. A State Department staffer is more concerned that she has written a memo arguing against war, which could ruin her career as the U.S. heads to war, than she is about the fact that she was correct about how the argument for going to war is full of holes and bad intelligence.
Remaining “in the loop” is the ultimate goal, a fair depiction of many — but not all — of those who staff our government in Washington, D.C. When I was a Senate staffer, I remember attending a series of appropriations-committee markups, where the government’s money would be spent for the upcoming year. A colleague leaned over as we watched the hearing and said how much he enjoyed the feeling of power in the room. I see him in more than a few characters in In the Loop, as in Veep. Iannucci sometimes goes over the top in his ridiculous scenarios, but In the Loop does get at the heart of the matter: that the Iraq War was brought on more by incompetency than by evil.
Iraqi Perspectives
For an Iraqi perspective on the war, Son of Babylon (2010), directed by Iraqi-Dutch director Mohamed Daradji, is a study of the human toll that Saddam’s rule had on the country. It is the story of a Kurdish woman who treks to Nasiriyah, south of Baghdad, in the hopes of finding her son in the notorious prison there, a few months after the U.S. invasion. He’s been missing since the First Gulf War in 1991. She heard several years earlier that he was there, though from the get-go it is clear that her mission is futile. Her twelve-year-old grandson, who never met his father, accompanies her and translates Arabic. That she doesn’t speak any Arabic is a reminder of the social divides in Iraq. Son of Babylon is superior to Daradji’s earlier work, Ahlaam (2004), but the documentary about making the latter, called War, Love, God, and Madness (2008), is a surreal portrait of trying to make a film in Baghdad just after the invasion, where the dangers of the U.S. military, extremists, and criminal gangs lurk around every corner.
French-Kurdish director Huner Saleem’s Kilometre Zero (2005) takes place mostly during the Iran–Iraq War of the 1980s but is bookended by opening and closing scenes around the U.S. invasion of 2003, from which the rest of the film is a flashback. It is a slow-moving story of a Kurdish and an Arab soldier tasked with carrying the body of a dead soldier back to Kurdistan in the country’s north. Another of Saleem’s films, My Sweet Pepper Land (2013), is one of the best films ever made in the Middle East. It is the story of a former Kurdish fighter who has become the police chief of a border town, where female fighters of the Kurdish resistance against Turkey clash with a local warlord who undermines the Kurdish cause at every corner. Unfortunately, the film only seems to be widely available with French subtitles, though I saw the film with English subtitles at a film festival in Beirut in 2013. It is a shame, because the film deserves to be better known. While it doesn’t deal directly with the war of 2003, it is a look at the Kurdistan region in the war’s aftermath, and the social and political problems still plaguing the region today. For those who read French (or understand Kurdish), it is well worth a watch.