SEVERE CLEAR
Edited, Written & Directed by Kristian Fraga
Produced by Marc J. Perez & Fraga
Released by Sirk Productions
USA. 93 min. Rated R
 

Severe Clear is the essential Iraq War home movie, edited from hundreds of hours of footage shot on a digital camera by First Lieutenant Mike Scotti. An artillery officer in the Marines, he accompanied the first wave of troops in the 330-mile push into Baghdad in 2003. Director and editor Kristian Fraga structures the documentary by having Scotti, now a financial analyst in New York, read letters and journal entries over his footage in order to chronicle why Scotti’s initial enthusiasm transformed into skepticism.

Unsurprisingly, the narrative imposed on the video will be recognizable to non-veterans who saw the excellent HBO miniseries Generation Kill. First, the troops kick up their heals in Kuwait, contending with apocalyptic dust storms and boredom; then their mechanized columns enter Iraq and speed along eerily deserted highways through the countryside, occasionally shelling advancing troops at night. As they approach Baghdad, the convoys get bogged down in urban block-to-block firefights (which Scotti somehow manages to film—you’d think someone would bully him to drop the camera and pick up a gun). Finally, after taking the capital, the looting, angry crowds, and mounting U.S. deaths ratchet up the soldiers’ doubts about the mission.

Most of the tension from this consistently engrossing film comes from a joke one of the Marines cracks when he sees Scotti’s camera. “Are you making a Faces of Death video?” he asks. Well, sort of. Midway through, the gore can be hard to stomach. During one of the late-night artillery barrages, where all one can see are arcs of light lobbing into the distance at Iraqi army positions, one off-screen marine observes, “It’s a bad day to be enemy infantry.” And it is. The filmmakers treat us to images of Iraqi soldiers (and some civilians) obliterated by bombs, including a man twisted in a ditch whose face is spread out over his chest. Most troubling, though, is a shot of a baby’s brain, obscenely pink, splattered on a sidewalk after its family ignored a roadblock and was pulverized by rifle fire.

However disturbing the corpses are, something near the beginning stayed with me longer. Early on, when the troops are waiting in Kuwait on the eve of their first breach into Iraq, an officer gives a St. Crispin’s-style speech to build morale, telling them that they’re about to do something courageous, liberate an oppressed people. Their deeds, he says, “will echo in eternity.” If you think you’ve heard that before, you have: it’s what Russell Crowe tells his men in the first scene of Gladiator. I don’t know if it’s funny or sad that off-hand lines of dialogue from bad movies can so burrow in people’s brains that they bubble up when they most need something original to say. Brendon Nafziger
March 12, 2010