Misunderstood, but still Monstrous

Rating: Null/10 (13 June 2003)

This film puts forward a very interesting moral question, which is apparently misunderstood by a lot of people who have seen it, judging by some of the comments below.
This film depicts a situation where a commanding officer believes he and his men are receiving heavy fire from a crowd of civilians. He therefore orders his men to fire into the crowd. He is then put on trial.
The question raised by this film is whether or not this event occurs because the officer, Childers, is a murderous individual, or because he behaves as any soldier would given his situation, to remove a perceived threat.
(That crowd of gun-carrying civilians later in the film is NOT an absolute representation of the reality of the crowd, as some seem to think, but is a representation of the situation Childers believed that he faced at that time - crucially, we see him to have been wounded by a sniper's ricochet, leading him to believe that he has received fire from street level, among the crowd - hence his order to fire in that direction).
It is, however, NOT a film that questions whether or not it's okay to shoot at civilians, and it is in this regard that it is misunderstood. The director has said he believes his film is arguing that whenever armed men exchange fire in the vicinity of civilians, civilians will die and it is for this reason that war should not be undertaken except with a grave awareness of the inevitable consequences.
This does not alter the fact that Childers ordered his soldiers to fire into a crowd of civilians. It is surely self-evident that this act is a war crime, and should not be excused on the grounds that it is simply the way that war is inevitably fought, or that Childers was acting to eliminate a perceived threat and not from some malicious desire for carnage. I find the argument that any officer in that position would have given the same order to be an interesting and disturbingly plausible one.
But. This film would be considered utterly and inarguably offensive if it took such a position on the way British Paratroopers fired into a civilian crowd in Northern Ireland on Bloody Sunday because they believed they were receiving fire from among the crowd. A similar film might be made about the Amritsar massacre, and would deservedly be despised. When soldiers deliberately kill civilians, (whatever their reasons) it is a crime - we know this, why do we need to debate it?
I admire the fact that this film attempted to take a challenging and uncomfortably real moral issue of war - that soldiers are trained and routinely expected to carry out their military objectives at any cost, even the lives of civilians if necessary. However, I despise the fact that this film appears to present no real case to the effect that just because a war-crime is committed as a result of an understandable military judgement, it does not cease to be a war crime.
After all, there are plenty of arguments as to why the deliberate targetting of civilians can further military objectives - this does not mean we should ever cease to find this repugnant and monstrous, even if our generals may sometimes find it necessary. Childers committed a crime, and however sound his reasons for doing so, it remains a crime. The soundness of his intent does not mean that the massacre he authored becomes in any way acceptable, or is transformed into some hideous accident. The incident that establishes the story, much like the film itself, cannot be mitigated by the soundness of motive behind it.
It is made very much worse by the fact that while the film may contain a dilemma, it is not presented in such a way that leads us to really consider it. The dishonourable conduct of the prosecutors lead us inevitably to sympathise with the defence in a very black-and-white way, and the Hero Who Should Not Stand Alone (as the tag-line leads me to see Childers) expresses nothing resembling a glimmer of remorse at the 'collateral damage' from his actions. If this is a Hero, I'd hate to see a Bad Guy. Oh no, wait, I did - those were the guys shooting from across the street, the guys who created the situation where Childers had absolutely no choice but to order his men to pour machine gun fire into a crowd of civilians without any warning. "You made me do it" wasn't a good excuse in the school playground, and it doesn't get any better when we become old enough to carry guns and fire them at other people.
Really, this is a quite fantastically repugnant film.