I Watched This: Armadillo

Armadillo, about a group of Danish soldiers in Afghanistan, doesn't feel like a documentary in a lot of ways. We never hear the filmmakers' voices and the soldiers never speak directly into the camera, interview-style. Actually, there's only one time, really, when one of the soldiers acknowledges the camera’s presence. It’s during one of the battles against the Taliban, after a Dutch fighter takes some shrapnel in the arm. The medic leans him against the wall of an abandoned compound and shoots morphine into the soldier's leg. As he (the soldier) gets gauzed-up, he looks at his comrades, all adrenal and hurried movements, one at a time. His eyes are huge and really white against the green war-paint that covers the rest of his face. There's a stillness to him, obviously not of awareness, but of drugged-hollowness. Then he looks directly at the camera, apparently through the screen. He stares as if at another member of his troop. There's something chilling in this piercing of the fourth wall, in this kid's silence and how, in a single look, he both ignores and addresses those-in-that-dark-theatre. David Foster Wallace says that the most horrifying moment in Lynch's Blue Velvet is when the psychotic, sexual-deviant Frank Booth, played by Dennis Hopper, looks straight at the camera and tells us, "You're like me."

The group of kids that we follow into Afghanistan are so ordinary. We meet most of them at a going-away party as they drink tequila shots and suck lemon out the mouth of a stripper. One of the soldiers, Mads, has one final dinner with his family before shipping out. His mom asks him why he's going to risk his life. For adventure and comradeship. This trip, he says, is like the football game and his training was just football practice. So mundane, these youths are. They're like that group of non-descript kids road-tripping in a station wagon in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Blank and bare and boring enough to be any youths anywhere.

Most modern war movies share elements with horror films. Apocalypse Now, with its lyricism and mood of anarchy. Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket echoes the psychosis of Kubrick's The Shining. In Armadillo, there's some Blair Witch Project. The shaky handheld camera (and it often feels like there is only one camera going), the walks through wide-open fields, silent except for the gravel and rustling grass underfoot. Quiet that, of course, promises something coming that’s loud and startling. Incoming bullets. As the soldiers stop and drop and yell, the camera spins and falls and eventually steadies low-to-the-ground and focuses on the empty areas at which the soldiers return fire. The Taliban seem invisible. The soldiers shoot at ghosts. And even scarier than the Taliban are the landmines that they plant. They're undetectable and make every patrol something of life and death. As the soldiers walk, there's a heaviness in their breathing, some caution, but also fear. One medic describes the clean-up after an IED detonates: "There was a hand in a glove and a heart lying around."

But the horror film that Armadillo most resembles, to me, is Dawn of the Dead, the original Romero version. Both films have extended sequences about boredom. In Dawn, the protagonists eventually tire of their safety, of having a Sears to loot for everything they might want. Fishing poles and linen. They only come back to life when the zombies attack and they have to fight for survival. In this Afghanistan base, the boys watch lots of porn. They pop wheelies on their dirtbikes. A couple of them even play a first-person Xbox military shooter against each other. When one of the avatars gets shot to death, it reappears with a gun with a full-clip. Even upon arrival, the kids' get not a primer on strategy or on procedure. One of the veteran soldiers tells them about a recent battle where 260 shells were fired. "It's not boring here," he answers without being asked, which betrays the fact that yes it is, indeed, often boring.

This is a pretty apolitical war documentary. The kids have no real moral compunctions about this war. Mads even says that he thought he was going to go to Kosovo before, last minute, the assignment changed to Afghanistan. The boys have nominal feelings for the Afghani civilians they're obstensibly meant to protect. From these bearded guys, with their headdresses and loose gowns, the soldiers ask but never plead for information on the local enemy forces. The soldiers seem to shrug their shoulders when the civilians refuse and explain that the Taliban will slit their (the civilians') throats if they help the Europeans. "You might be wondering," the commanding officer says at one point, "if the war is still relevant for us Danes." Scary how fearlessly they fight for nothing.