The way in which the film presents its information, photographs, re-enactments, and data is just brilliant. The film will go from the generic “talking heads” style of documentary to representing what a certain interviewee is saying on screen; that may be photographs lined up next to each other (fading in and out, for example) or factual data swiveling in and out of the screen. It’s fairly hard to explain in words but let’s just say the director Errol Morris has done some impressive stuff with the way in which he represents certain things that sort of spices the documentary up a bit from the generic.
This isn’t the easiest of films to watch; even for a documentary it’s very heavy, and is quite - sometimes very - depressing indeed. If you’re not used to heavier documentaries then I definitely wouldn’t recommend this as your first. Try and ease yourself in with something lighter and/or comedic, like Bowling for Columbine for example.
The film makes a case for the US soldiers, although it’s the soldiers themselves as interviewees that do the arguing for the point, that they were “just following orders”. It isn’t at all one-sided, at least from my point of view, but rather presents the factual information clearly and concisely and allows the audience to make up its own mind. If anyone comes away from this film feeling anything less than shocked then they just haven’t paid attention.
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