One sunny day in November 2005, a roadside bomb killed one US Marine and injured two others in Haditha, a dusty town in the Euphrates Valley northwest of Baghdad. Enraged by the attack, the Marines set off on a bloody, indiscriminate rampage, massacring 24 Iraqi civilians, including at least 10 women and children. British filmmaker Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha is a shocking dramatized account of that shameful chapter of the war.
The director who made his name with such sensation-seeking documentaries as Kurt & Courtney, Biggie and Tupac, and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, uses docu-type techniques — hand-held camera, in-your-face close-ups, rapid-fire editing- to bring an ultra-realistic immediacy to this direct-to-DVD release.
Shot in Jordan with mostly non-professional performers, the film looks at events from three vantage points: the Sunni insurgents Ahmad (Falah Flayeh), a middle-aged family man, and Jafar (Oliver Bytrus), a young guy who works in a video store, who planted the bomb for a reward of $500 plus a $500 'success’ fee ; the innocent villagers who were caught up in the tragedy; and the Marines led by Corporal Ramirez (Elliot Ruiz, a former Marine who was injured in Tikrit). Ahmad previously served in the Iraqi Army, which was disbanded by the Americans, whom he blames them for creating the insurgency.
The villagers feared they’d be killed by the terrorists if they forewarned the Americans about the bomb, and accused by the Yanks of siding with the terrorists if they remained silent.
The screenplay by Broomfield, Marc Hoeferlin and Anna Telford largely portrays the soldiers as helpless tools of the war machine, who don’t know why they’re risking their lives in Iraq, a Godforsaken place which one describes as a 'butthole." Ramirez may just have been following orders but he suffered nightmares before that fateful day and accepts he will be forever haunted by the memories.
The tension leading up to the explosion is almost unbearable, while the blast and its aftermath are gruesomely portrayed. This is a powerful, disturbing and gut-wrenching film, one of the best war movies I’ve ever seen.
