Le long chemin du retour

April 2004. The US 1st Cavalry Division has recently relieved the 1st Armored Division in its occupation of Sadr City, Baghdad. Everything seems peaceful until one day a platoon is ambushed in the city while on patrol. The platoon holes up in a house and reinforcements are sent to extract them. However, the relief column is itself ambushed, the main aim of the initial ambush. What follows is a life-and-death struggle against overwhelming odds. Based on actual events.

Pretty good, but requires some patience to get there. I was initially expecting a Generation Kill-like series, i.e. based on a true military story, follow a unit and are engaged by the camaraderie, gritty action scenes. However, the series immediately failed on the engagement front. Scenes showing soldiers with their family seemed token, padded and superficially sentimental. The unit brotherhood also seemed quite artificial, with forced, unnatural-feeling dialogue and interactions.

The first 2-3 episodes were all like this, to the point where I was thinking of giving up on the series. Comparing it with Generation Kill is obviously a very high standard to emulate, as Generation Kill is one of the best military mini-series of all time (only Band of Brothers is better), so maybe disappointment was inevitable.

However, from a point, the series clicked into gear. The soldiers' backstories went from mundane meet-the-family stuff to interesting series of events, linking in with their current situation and revealing their characters. The dialogue and interactions became more plausible. These all lifted the engagement level significantly. In addition. the action got grittier, more intense and more compelling.

The final episode is very poignant, with a great emotionally-manipulative twist. Makes the effects of war very realistic and stark.

Overall, a good series, just don't give up in the first few episodes - it gets a whole lot better.

I really can't understand all the negative reviews this series has garnered as I really enjoyed it. It's not the best acted but it depicts a true series of events and does an excellent job of showing how badly the American forces had prepared for urban warfare at that time.

Sending an open truck, without a radio and full of troops into streets of multi-storey buildings packed with well armed insurgents is obviously, in hindsight, just madness but that was what the American military did. In a similar fashion the UK sent out unarmoured Land Rover Defenders before finding out that they tended to get blown up by unscrupulous terrorists. Lessons were learned the hard way back then and the series does a good job of showing that.

Yes the "homeland" stuff is occasionally a bit cheesy but people "Get over yourselves!" and see the entire series for, overall, a relatively inexpensive good bit of TV entertainment.

Much of the cinematic coverage of Iraq War was focused on fighting against Saddam's army and the Sunni resistance. This movie focuses on the experience of a U.S. Army unit in the midst of the Shiite area of Sadr City. As such it focuses on the Army's attempt to win "hearts and minds" but also deal with an insurgent threat.

The depictions are gritty and realistic. However, the first couple of episodes have a few glitches. One, it implies that Iraq was considered peaceful prior to the unit's arrival in April 2004, when an active insurgency had been under way since the summer of 2003. Also, members of the unit repeatedly say one the name and rank of one of their fellow soldiers over the radio, which is a big communications security "no-no." However, it does a good job depicting the contemporary military, equipment, uniforms and customs.

Sure the acting isn't great but take it for what it is. It's a series depicting a true event that happened to US soldiers. As a veteran myself and living just down the road from Fort Hood, I think it's crazy the nerve that these keyboard warriors on the internet have. It tells the story well. It shows the front line battles and the battles that happen back home that some shows don't touch.

We want war stories to express the paradox of war: how we hate war and how we love war; how it destroys life and affirms life's worth.

Don't look for that complexity here, though. What it offers, instead, is the conventional. If you've seen one Iraq War movie, you'll come away feeling you've already seen all this before.

These people seem incapable of doing the unexpected despite the horrific blood and violence., As they grapple with death. you get no sense of unbearable stress demolishing their façades and wrenching their guts.

It's not entirely the actors' fault, though, the way the dialogue just plods along, giving them no opening to get us inside their characters and reveal the interior.

That leaves much of the dramatic work to the annoying musical underscoring. It won't leave you alone; it's always there dictating what you're supposed to feel.

In the end, with nothing unexpected or surprising to grab you, you're left feeling you've wasted your time. .