A Really cool film

Rating: 9/10 (27 September 2009)

It is not often I stumble upon a movie that is so well thought out as this one. Initially I thought I would not watch it, being about Iraq I had expected a lot of bull, even joked about how cool it would be to make a movie about a German squad having to live amongst the French, not knowing whether they are foe or not. However, this movie was great, following the lives of people in a bomb squad in Iraq, as they are worming their way through the 40 days of company rotation left.
There are a lot of good things in this film. One of them is the casting. At least three well known actors that have accepted playing in the movie, but their roles are only a few minutes long, more like cameos. This solves the problem of knowing exactly who lives and who dies just by looking up their IMDb rating. Another is that the characters in the film are all flawed in some way. They are not the perfect good guys, so boringly unrealistic in many movies of the genre.
But what I thought was most important of all, is the capturing of the feeling of the place, without gluing the audience to a single character to which to identify. It is the same thing that made me love Strange Days, also directed by Kathryn Bigelow. This movie is great because it feels like a book and a precious few films manage to achieve this feat.