Reviews

Films

Battle For Haditha

Directed by Nick Broomfield, starring Elliot Ruiz, Eric Mehalacopoulos, Andrew McLaren, Yasmine Hanani

In Battle For Haditha, a fictionalized documentary, Nick Broomfield reconstructed two days in November 2005 when American Marines took a terrible revenge on the civilian population of an Iraqi town after the death of a comrade in a roadside bomb incident. In all, they killed 24 men, women and children.

Broomfield's picture begins with some Marines from different ethnic backgrounds talking to camera about the bitter experience of the war in Iraq. All are genuine veterans no longer with the Marine Corps, playing people much like themselves and improvizing a deal of the dialogue. We next see them crossing the desert in two Humvees, larking around in high spirits. Behind them, two camels are silhouetted on the horizon - a beautiful, potent image. Next, these men are on patrol in Haditha, once, so we're told, a favorite place for honeymooners, now "the city of death", contested by insurgents and the American army.

The film then interweaves three narrative threads that will at the climax combine in a horrible noose. First, there are the young Marines, edgy, tired, full of macho pride in the corps but with little sense of purpose and no understanding of the people they came to liberate but now regard as their enemies. In the second strand, the two bombers go about their business. One is a young man working in a store selling bootleg DVDs and second-hand electronic equipment, the other a middle-aged family man, thrown out of the Iraqi army by the invaders after 20 years of service and with no compensation. They pick up a bomb from al-Qaeda men, crazed fanatics who the previous week murdered 29 cops and have given alcohol vendors three days to desist or die. In the third strand, both detailed and extremely moving, we're introduced to the people living near the scene of the proposed crime. The Guardian

Cloverfield

Directed by Matt Reeves, starring Lizzy Caplan, Jessica Lucas, TJ Miller, Michael Stahl-David

Here is a monster movie with monster special effects and monster shouty acting, which recalls the Godzilla phenomenon in more ways than its producer-creator JJ Abrams perhaps realizes.

Shot throughout in wobbly, faux-handheld digital video, the movie is ostensibly amateur footage that the US army has recovered, in true Blair Witch style, from an area of New York that has recently been devastated by a giant, roaring, tail-lashing monster!

It shows a surprise party being thrown for troubled yuppie twentysomething Rob (Michael Stahl-David); fellow guest Beth (Odette Yustman) is tense with him, because weeks before they'd had sex and spent a romantic day together, but since then he's caddishly failed to call her. Beth leaves early, and then there's an almighty crash. Some great big lunk of a monster has only gone and ripped the head off the Statue of Liberty and thrown it into the street outside their apartment: that's all!

From then on, it's chaos. Buildings fall, people scream, and the monster releases little spidery sub-creatures the size of Vespa scooters for some hand-to-hand yuckiness. But amidst it all, Rob has to reach Beth to tell her he loves her, an epic and dangerous journey he undertakes in the company of other babelicious hotties in various stages of disarray, undress, and blood-foaming, monster-bitten disease. The effects are great; for many, this monster will be more exciting than the calmer manifestations in Bong Joon-ho's South Korean monster movie The Host, or Peter Jackson's serenely beautiful shots of King Kong atop the Empire State building.

The Guardian

(China Daily 02/05/2008 page20)