Armadillo

How do you really review a movie like Armadillo? Like so many documentaries about the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere around the world, its sobering subject matter and venerable production context can make most conventional criticisms feel ungracious, even petty. How can a critic complain about the aesthetic qualities of a given shot when one knows that that image was captured in the heat of real-life combat, and at great personal risk to the one behind the camera? And what can we really say about the soldiers whose lives are chronicled? If we’re that upset about a given person’s behavior or actions, why don’t we ship out to Afghanistan in their stead? Separating the “importance” of a film’s existence for the furthering of informed public discourse from the “quality” of said film as a cinematic object is fraught with intellectual and ideological pitfalls (beginning with the problematic idea that these two issues should be considered separately at all).

When judging Armadillo, I suppose the best that one can do is to preface any evaluative statements with the (hopefully) obvious point that the footage seen within Janus Metz’s film is crucial and often extraordinary. Metz traveled with a group of Danish soldiers on their six-month tour of duty in the southern Afghan province of Helmand. Stationed at the eponymous army base, the unit includes a fair number of fresh recruits primed to see some on-the-ground action but remain largely confined to routine rounds about the province and long stretches of tedium back at the base. When Taliban forces finally begin to attack, Manz is right there beside them. His camera whips and shakes as he maneuvers to avoid whizzing enemy bullets. These frenetic images find their aural complement in the shouted orders and expletives coming from the soldiers and the occasional battle cry of the Taliban fighters. In a particularly stunning sequence, a camera seemingly attached to the head of either Metz or a soldier films the chaotic aftermath of a Taliban attack in a single, shaky long take—every messy moment of post-battle confusion (and exhilaration) on display. Such visceral footage puts one in a state of double appreciation, commending both the film’s subjects for entering into such a frenzied nightmare and Metz for following them there to bring back a harrowing taste of life during wartime.

Just as fascinating (and perhaps even more necessary) are the many conversations that Metz records between the soldiers and the local Afghan populace. Military actions meant to protect the local populace end up producing disastrous collateral damage, as impoverished men recount the loss of family-supporting livestock and farmland to the soldiers’ tanks and rockets. Afghan civilians convey these losses with varying degrees of resignation, anger, and bewilderment. Soldiers attempt to console them with increasingly-threadbare declarations of common interest and long-term security. The gridlock that ensues offers a telling insight into how wars become won and lost through quotidian communication breakdown as much as large-scale tactical blunders.

Then again, didn’t we already know that? Such is the trouble with Armadillo: the nagging feeling that the very structure of the contemporary war documentary turns visceral on-the-ground experience into digestible tropes. Much of Armadillo oscillates between the unpredictable dangers of patrolling the Afghan countryside with the tedium of base life. Soldiers kill time by joshing around, playing video games, calling their families, watching porn. Metz documents these vignettes of everyday military life dutifully and with occasional stylistics flourish (as when a shot of a digital rocket launched in a first-person-shooter game cuts to a real-life explosion in a similarly-shaped building). Is it churlish to question whether this view of the contemporary soldier’s life is molded as much by filmic conventions and cultural stereotypes as it is by the true-life experiences that Metz captured? I wondered if there might be a little more in Metz’s footage than he recognized (or chose to recognize). Throughout, I felt edification without revelation.

At least, until the film’s final twenty minutes or so, when Armadillo ventures into some of the thornier aspects of military justice and the ethics of modern combat. It feels odd issuing a “spoiler alert” for events that can easily be searched online. Nevertheless, it adds to the cumulative impact to know as little as possible about the troops’ late-film fighter fight against a group of Taliban fighters. How we feel about their actions in the moment—both in terms of emotional catharsis and objective justification—depends upon our growing connection to them over the course of the film, and gets called into question in its final moments. Suddenly, the insular nature of the unit feels like willfully-constructed blinders as much as a means of team-building and camaraderie. Metz, intriguingly, remains assiduously non-judgmental to the end, capturing the glimmers of uncertainty and doubt within the soldier’s faces while refusing to discount the reasoning behind their actions.

Armadillo’s structure has a sneaky brilliance to it. Metz so submerges the viewer in the mores and mechanics of the unit’s world, you might not realize until after the effect how troubling (if understandable) some of the soldiers’ action really were. Yet this same structure comes at a cost. By saving the most intriguing moral conundrums for the end, Metz shortchanges both himself and his audience. Unsettling ideas about the problematic nature of military power structures and the ethical gray zones of modern combat are tantalizingly raised right as the curtain falls, leaving further meditation to the viewer alone. I respect and appreciate Armadillo for broaching them. Yet, given the familiar paths that Metz treads throughout most of his film, why save the rockier, more rewarding terrain for the brief final stretch?

                                               Matt Connolly