The Road To Guantánamo
Picture:
B- Sound: B- Extras: C- Film: B-
Michael
Winterbottom keeps pushing the envelope in interesting ways and co-directing The Road To Guantánamo (2006) with Mat
Whitecross is just the latest in one of the most distinguished and risk-taking
independent film careers going. Even his
use of video is cinematic. I wish I
could say that about most using it at this point.
The film
crosses interviews with former U.S. X-ray camp prisoners in Cuba with
reenactments of what they went through.
Instead of being a film that bashes the U.S. outright, it just shows
what the former prisoners went through.
The group in the film is traveling to Afghanistan (big mistake with The
Taliban there to begin with) around the time of 9/11 and the U.S. bombing
campaign gets rolling when they arrive.
They even have to see the dead bodies and barely alive ones. Even barely alive, some are thrown into a
ditch because there is no hope, help and it looks like no one cares who could
help.
Then, as
they are making their way through, one of whom is going to get married, they
are apprehended in a raid by the U.S. to find terrorists. The film then goes through the long process
of how they are assimilated, treated and tells the story about the experience
and ordeal of how they were treated. It
is an ugly situation and there are several ways to look at it. The U.S. was in the right to go after the
base of the terrorists, but did they overdo it?
Were the rights of some of these prisoners violated? If the U.S. did not do this, would another
attack really have happened?
They are
all tough questions and to side with the U.S., better safe than sorry. To side with the prisoners, is there no way
to check these guys faster to make sure they had captured the real
criminals? Of course, as bad as this got
for the principles incarcerated, it turns out that the outright abuse became
much worse and none of the principles claim to have had that happened to them. That makes their side of the story all the
more authentic and believable.
As odd as
this might be to say, I thought the torture scenes were the weak point of the
film and id not go far enough to show (regardless of who was holding who in
which prison) on a cinematic level to be effective and may do injustice to the
witness testimony. Needless to say the
filmmakers were not treating the U.S. with kid glove hands. Though it is not a great work, The Road To Guantánamo is an
interesting one that will inspire intelligent discussion and proper debate.
The anamorphically
enhanced 1.78 X 1 image is a mix of video formats and possibly some film, but
is trying to be documentary-like and does not overdo it. The Dolby Digital 5.1 mix is limited in
surrounds, not so loud or dynamic, but is not bad. There are sonic limits in the music in
particular. Only trailers for other Sony
DVD product are included as extras.
- Nicholas Sheffo
