Severe Clear

A by the numbers documentary of the Iraq war. Now that everyone and their brother can bring a camera down there, there is a flood of available material. Thus we have a ton of documentaries about the two wars.

This is not one of the better ones. It lacks any real sense of critical thinking and falls victim to flag-waving more than anything else but this is not the films main problem.

The by far largest problem of the documentary is the protagonist Scotti. He's a pseudo-intellectual who narrates the documentary and through the course of the movie he will have said pretty much every blatantly stolen stereotypical thing someone can say about war. He tries really hard to sound both like a "cool soldier" and a guy who's really smart but fails miserably on both counts. This is of course a problem since the documentary stops being about the war and starts being about Scotti. And nobody loves Mike Scotti more than Mike Scotti.