No End In Sight

A startling documentation of Bush regime malfeasance, misrepresentation, incompetence, and hubris, Charles Ferguson’s No End in Sight provides an in-depth analysis of the way the war in Iraq was mishandled in its earliest stages. Ferguson, whose doc won a prize at Sundance this year, interviews dozens of administration insiders, military officials, GIs, and journalists, including Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, General Jay Garner, National Security official Walter Slocombe, and author George Packer (whose accounts of the invasion for The New Yorker have covered much of the same ground the film does--he and Ferguson were poker buddies at MIT and their correspondence apparently inspired the film). By turns surprising (who knew that only 5 of the first 150 American bureaucrats in the newly “liberated” Iraq could speak Arabic!?) and shatteringly depressing, No End in Sight may well be the definitive cinematic document on the buildup and execution of the invasion to date. As such it does a tremendous public service in a succinct and eloquent telling of how our best intentions went so dangerously wrong.

Partisanship doesn’t seem to weigh in here. This is a cool, composed series of talking-head pieces and archival footage that devastate without critique and build to a genuinely moving whole.  Charles Ferguson's incendiary film leaves an introspective audience wondering how to right this wrong and what horrors are still to come because of the arrogance and immorality of powerful men.

                                                       Brandon Harris