Gunner Palace follows a company of soldiers as they spend one year in Iraq headquartered in a bombed-out palace that used to belong to Uday Hussein. The film begins after initial fighting in Iraq has ended, and the real fighting only just begun. As a result, the whole thing ends up becoming very much like COPS in Baghdad. Which is a fascinating thing to watch.

Like COPS, the film doesn't provide very much in the way of narrative structure, but what it lacks in forward momentum it makes up for in being a unique voice in the world of war coverage. This is the ground war. This is the troops' perspective. This is not CNN. This is not Fox News (though Armed Forces Radio excerpts tie scenes together). And when you take all of the disparate opinions about the war in the US into account, what you end up seeing here is...not all that surprising.

Some Iraqis love us. Some hate us. IED's are the devil. The troops are proud to serve, but don't feel like they're defending America anymore. They make fun of the "armor" protecting their vehicles - scrap metal they scrounged which will slow down the shrapnel enough to stick in you instead of just go right through, as one of the soldiers points out. You won't find an out-and-out indictment of the war here, but you won't find blind patriotism, either.

The really fascinating aspect of this film, however, is the music. Many of the soldiers in the film express themselves musically, and of those, most use hip-hop. The soundtrack is almost exclusively soldier-produced. And their raps are devastating. When these guys get back to the states, someone better give them a contract. If, as Chuck D once said, rap is the "black CNN," then these guys are that network's war correspondents, delivering their take on the war at 135 beats-per-minute.