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War Tapes, The
Generally favorable reviews
Based on 24 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 3 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Documentary
Written by:
Directed by: Deborah Scranton
Release Date:
Theatrical: June 2, 2006
DVD: May 15, 2007
Running Time: 97 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: Not Rated
Starring Zack Bazzi, Duncan Domey, Ben Flanders, Mike Moriarity, Steve Pink, and Brandon Wilkins
In March 2004, just as the insurgent movement strengthened, several members of one National Guard unit arrived in Iraq, carrying digital video cameras. The War Tapes is the movie they made with Director Deborah Scranton and a team of award-winning filmmakers. It's the first war movie filmed by soldiers themselves on the front lines in Iraq. (SenArt Films)
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
The best documentary to date about the military occupation of Iraq.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
It's an experience that blows your mind, clears it and educates it.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
There's a lot to process when watching The War Tapes, and that's probably why the documentary gets even better a few days later.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
The War Tapes captures how the war in Iraq, for all its terrible carnage and death, is in a way too random in its destruction to even be called ''combat.''
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Wesley Morris
Really the film is a deft first-person character study with a war zone for a background.
Read Full Review >New York Post Kyle Smith
We get to know three of these courageous, funny, smart and perhaps permanently damaged men in a film that largely avoids telling us what to think and makes an effort to get near the truth of the soldiers' experience.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Noel Murray
The War Tapes falls just short of greatness, because its scope is too limited.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
This film is apolitical in the best sense - it bears witness to a time and a place.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Marc Mohan
The edited footage has an intensity and immediacy you won't find on cable news networks.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Mark Olsen
The film acutely captures the topsy-turvy uncertainty of life during wartime, where there's Burger King and land mines and Pizza Hut and snipers.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
In the latest of what is getting to be a booming genre of Iraq war documentaries, director Deborah Scranton gives digital video cameras to five members of the New Hampshire Army National Guard so they can intimately record their year of service in the Middle East.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
The documentary camera has made repeated trips to occupied Iraq, but never to such raw and honest effect as in The War Tapes. The reason is surprisingly simple: This time, the lens is being pointed not by embedded journalists, but by the American soldiers themselves.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Dana Stevens
Whatever your opinion of the war - and however it has changed over the years - this movie is sure to challenge your thinking and disturb your composure. It provides no reassurance, no euphemism, no closure. Given the subject and the circumstances, how could it?
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Frank Scheck
The latest in a series of big-screen documentaries dealing with the conflict, and it does so in a particularly involving, fly-on-the-wall manner.
Read Full Review >Variety Ronnie Scheib
The picture's deepest fascination lies in the soldiers' complicated reactions to the war, perceived simultaneously as funny, horrific, stirring and traumatic.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine David Edelstein
See The War Tapes. Maybe this picture can be worth a thousand lives.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Tim Grierson
With its weary disillusionment, The War Tapes shouldn't be criticized for its seeming lack of outrage. Indeed, from the overwhelming grief and anger it uncovers, the film feels appropriately, uncomfortably numb.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Ken Fox
While we at home can't come close to experiencing the war in any real sense, we do come away from Scranton's film with a greater sense of the soldiers' everyday fear, helplessness and horror.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jack Mathews
A gripping, sometimes dramatic, sometimes annoying collection of jerky images and subjective impressions.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Ann Hornaday
Make no mistake: The War Tapes is not an overtly political film. It appears to grind no partisan ax nor score either red or blue points. Whether viewers support the war or not -- or find themselves somewhere in the mushy middle -- this documentary won't fit comfortably into the pigeonholes of their preconceptions.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Michael Atkinson
On a strictly experiential level, Deborah Scranton's The War Tapes is remarkable, tactile, and affecting; as a piece of sociopolitical culture with context and ramifications of its own, it's a worthless ration of war propaganda--ethnocentric, redneck, and enabling.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 9.0 (out of 10) based on 3 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
VLadimir G. gave it an8:
In a world where documentaries oftentimes seek to indoctrinate rather than inform it's refreshing to see a movie where the makers suppressed their own biases as much as possible. The result is a nuanced and complex portrait of the war, not the standard one fed the public by each of the parties and from the general news media. Well-worth a watch.
