hood
05-23-2004, 09:53 AM
A while back, someone mentioned this video on here and asked what I thought of it after I mentioned that I'd pick it up. After more than 1.5 months of it sitting on my desk, I finally watched it. It contains the footage of 11 men in India company of the Marines as they pushed towards baghdad last year. I ordered it with the hope of seeing footage that was uncensored and clips that we might not have seen on regular TV. This was made by combat films, the same people who did the excellent documentary on the Mazar E Sharif prison uprising in Afghanistan. Unfortunately this DVD doesn't deliver in that way. What it shows, is this group in and out of their amphibious unit most of the time, doing very little. According to this, their group went through various battles, which turned out to be engagements with emtpy buildings. If this was the only footage that you saw of the war, you'd think that no Iraqi ever fired back. and we basically just drove to baghdad, completely unresisted. They have various clips of the Marines talking, mentioning how they didn't mind that there was no resistence, that they didn't miss the opportunity of getting shot at.
The dvd presents the video as is, with no narration, no opinions, and no context of what else was going on during the war at the time. They have titles on the screen showing the dates at times. What's annoying though is that one title shows March 24th, near the opening of the war, and the next title/scene is April 4th near the end of the war. Was there no footage of value in 10 days, the actual meat of the war? The only combat footage where there's real targets being shot at, is when a bus runs a checkpoint and they destroy it with what seems to be .50 cal machine guns. When an unarmed man manages to crawl out of the bus and tries to run towards a nearby shack to escape the bullets, they hit him with the machine gun fire which splatters him all over the inside of the shack. (They go to investigate the shack to make sure he's not just injured, when they arrive, the entire inside of the shack is painted with his blood from the high caliber shots. )
All in all, the video isn't worth the price of admission if you've seen the other footage out there. It's nice to see what life was like during the war from a less glamorous viewpoint, but it doesn't make for interesting video after 5 minutes of it.
The dvd presents the video as is, with no narration, no opinions, and no context of what else was going on during the war at the time. They have titles on the screen showing the dates at times. What's annoying though is that one title shows March 24th, near the opening of the war, and the next title/scene is April 4th near the end of the war. Was there no footage of value in 10 days, the actual meat of the war? The only combat footage where there's real targets being shot at, is when a bus runs a checkpoint and they destroy it with what seems to be .50 cal machine guns. When an unarmed man manages to crawl out of the bus and tries to run towards a nearby shack to escape the bullets, they hit him with the machine gun fire which splatters him all over the inside of the shack. (They go to investigate the shack to make sure he's not just injured, when they arrive, the entire inside of the shack is painted with his blood from the high caliber shots. )
All in all, the video isn't worth the price of admission if you've seen the other footage out there. It's nice to see what life was like during the war from a less glamorous viewpoint, but it doesn't make for interesting video after 5 minutes of it.