GazerRise Fantastic!

Spoonixel Amateur movie with Big budget

Dotbankey A lot of fun.

Darin One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

cufc01 If you take the film for what it is - a damning indictment of the American treatment of suspected POWs, entirely against the Geneva Convention - then it deserves praise for its reconstruction of the appalling American hypocrisy perpetrated at Guantanamo Bay.Unfortunately the film entirely fails to question why these British citizens travelled to Afghanistan and then, by their own later admission, attended militant training camps. Instead, it portrays them as virtually completely innocent and caught up in circumstances beyond their control.While in no way excusing the utterly unacceptable and shameful behaviour of the US government and military, the fact that these lads clearly put themselves in the way of danger is not sufficiently explored in the film.

tieman64 "None of us were ever told why we were in Cuba. We were told that they considered us 'unlawful combatants,' but whenever any of us asked what this meant they refused to give us a definition." - Shafik RasulThree young Muslim men journey from Britain to Pakistan to attend a family wedding. After the wedding they decide to travel to Afganistan, where they are arrested by American soldiers who, believing them to be "terrorists", ship them off to the detention camps at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba. The rest of the film consists of horrific torture sequences, the men abused for 2 years before being released without charge. Michael Winterbottom's "The Road to Guantanamo" plays like an angry sequel to his earlier film, "In This World". Both films use amateur actors, cinema verite techniques and sport an urgent aesthetic which resembles unfolding reality TV. There are differences, though. With "Guantanamo" Winterbottom splices interview footage and eyewitness accounts into his dramatic reconstruction of the trio's ordeal. These interviews are designed to validate the film's politics - its a heavy handed attack on the US, the Bush administration, the Patriot Act and the West's "war on terror" - but they also have the unintended effect of questioning the veracity of our eyewitnesses; their testimonies are as staged and self-consciously hyperbolic as Winterbottom's "reconstructed drama" itself.The film is at times gripping, albeit in a safe, agitprop way. The US soldiers come across as little Nazis, subjecting their victims to various torture techniques, beatings, abuse, racial/religious attacks (burning Korans etc) and a bevy of dehumanising techniques (refering to prisoners as numbers etc), all of which provoke suicides, tears and lots of physical and psychological trauma. And of course while all this madness unfolds, the words "Honor Bound To Defend Freedom" remain stencilled on Guantanamo Bay's cold walls. So what we have here is essentially, like De Palma's recent "Redacted", and to a lesser extent Assad's "Paradise Now", Winterbottom's "In This World" and Godard's "Our Music", the angry flip side to a wave of contemporary war mongering films like "World Trade Centre", "Blackhawk Down", "Saving Private Ryan", "United 93" etc. Where those films demonize the Other (Arabs, Germans, Middle Easterners, Africans etc) and glorify Americans and their quasi-religious sacrifices to the state's blood cult, Winterbottom attempts to humanise the Other. The irony is, this requires him to paint the American Empire as 21st century sadists. He has no inkling of the larger (psychosocioeconomic) systemic reasons for suffering.The question here is whether "Road To Guantanamo" is "bad art" because it engages in the same tactics as its opposition but applies these tactics to an opposing agenda (it portrays US soldiers as one dimensional villains). On one hand, a better director would engage with these issues with more objectivity, depth and insight, but on the other hand we have someone like George Orwell who swears by always siding with victims and underdogs. Psychologists once did an experiment where they showed participants two maps of Israel: one showing it as a large country surrounding the small Palestinian enclaves, and the other showing it as a tiny island in the middle of the hostile Arab world. In the "Palestinians as underdogs" condition, 55% said they supported Palestine. In the "Israelis as underdogs" condition, 75% said they supported Israel. In other words, you can change opinion thirty points by altering perceived underdog status. Winterbottom gains his 30 percent by decreasing the size of his underdog heroes and increasing the size of those who bully them, but of course historical truth is on his side. Which is why films like "United 93", "WTC", "Saving Private Ryan", "Black Hawk Down", "Munich" etc engage in what is called "passive victimhood" (ie – the feigning of being a victim or underdog). These films are all tragedies in which truth is skewed such that the "historical victim" is shown to be "the aggressor" and the "historical aggressor" is falsely shown to be either "the victim" or up against huge odds or facing some difficult mission. It's why we painted the Irish as devils for centuries and now as lovable rogues.Beyond this, the film touches upon a couple other themes – the fact that the majority of designated "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo have never been charged with any crime, the fact that more than two hundred and fifty prisoners have been released from the camp with no intimation that they did anything wrong, the sheer immorality and futility of using torture as a means of extracting information from someone who has no information to extract, the evils of Bush's "anti-terrorist policy", a policy which allows civilians to be imprisoned and interrogated without evidence etc etc – but it's the things which the film omits that are most interesting.For example, Guantanamo is the least shady prison in a web of illegal US prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and Macedonia (consider the case of Khaled el-Masri, who from 2003-2004 was erroneously held in Macedonia and Afghanistan by the CIA), and the film seems very embarrassed of the fact that its "heroes" travelled from Pakistan and into Afghanistan, Winterbottom attributing their journey to a mix up with a bus.This poor explanation as to why the boys were in Afganistan has led to critics supposing that maybe the trio really were attending "terrorist camps". What no one is brave enough to say is that with the adult world long discredited, such actions by them are perfectly understandable. Its no surprise, nor their fault, that alienated young Muslim's would go so far in an attempt to consolidate their own sense of identity. Such an attempted rites of passage shames Winterbottom, and perhaps the trio themselves8/10 – Didactic, visceral, simplistic.

emuir-1 Many reviewers have criticized this film for being one sided and told from the perspective of the Tipton Three, but as we are not allowed to see what goes on inside Guantanamo, and the inmates are not charged with any crime or allowed contact with their families or legal counsel (they don't need it as they have not been charged with a crime), we have to go on what accounts have filtered through.A country which asserts itself as the moral compass of the world, and which is based on freedom, liberty and justice for all, has to be held to a higher standard of accountability. Justice for all mean ALL, not those whom we pick and choose. The very fact that detainees are held outside the US without trial, and in conditions which we have seen in pictures of Abu Ghraib indicates that they are not playing by their own rules. Many US ideals have been jettisoned in the name of patriotism, and "If you're not with us, you're with the enemy!" rhetoric.Four young chavs nurtured in the safety and comfort of Britain's welfare state, with its free health care, education and social security for those who don't find work, go off to Pakistan for a wedding, and suffer a little culture shock, not to mention the intestinal distress caused by the food and water in foreign parts. Having been accustomed to cheese stuffed pizza, burgers, supermarkets and shopping malls, they are somewhat shocked to find meat sold in the open with clouds of flies everywhere, and according to one, the food smells like sh*t with spices.While in Pakistan, they decide to check out next door Afghanistan just prior to the US bombing. While this may have been from a sense of youthful adventure, their actions don't bear close scrutiny, whether from naive stupidity or idealism or ulterior motives. They may have been no different from young idealists who went to fight in the Spanish Civil War, young Canadians and Americans who enlisted in the British Forces in WWII, mercenaries anywhere, or naive adventurers caught trying to smuggle drugs through the far east, but once in Afghanistan they quickly find that war is not an adventurous lark after all. They are rounded up by the Northern Alliance after a brutal bombing raid leaves many dead or horribly wounded, and after barely surviving a month in captivity, they are handed over to the US special forces.As this is a British film, the US are depicted as loudmouthed, bullying thugs, without too much brain matter - when one detainee is asked where he comes from and replies Titpon, the interrogator snaps "Wheresat"; regardless, they ship the young men off to Guantanamo Bay prison camp where they brutalize them physically and mentally for two years to try to force the young men to confess what they want them to say - that they are card carrying members of Al Qaeda on first name terms with Osama bin Laden. Considering the mind set of a military which charged the Muslim prison chaplain at Guantanamo with treason for ministering to his flock, I rather suspect that the depiction of the interrogators is not far from the truth. Why the facts of the men's story could not be verified for more than two years is a good question. They were being accused of belonging to Al Qaeda and hobnobbing with Osama Bin Laden in 2000, when they were actually engaging in petty crime in Britain and having to report to the police on a regular basis. In the politically motivated American idea of justice, if you confess to a crime, whether or not you are guilty, you will get off lightly. If you refuse to confess, because you are not guilty perhaps, it will go much harder for you (just watch Court TV) because you have wasted their time? The facts are that a number of detainees being held without trial or any access to legal counsel have committed suicide. We have seen the way prisoners were treated at Abu Ghraib, and newsreel footage of people condemning those who blew the whistle. We have also seen the July 11, 2005 bombings in Britain carried out by young men very similar to the Titpton Three. All the bombers were described as decent young men and boys-next-door types. One of them was even an elementary schoolteacher! I personally feel that the Tipton Three were up to no good and quite possibly were trying to join the fighting in some way or another, but they were not aware of what they were getting into until it was too late to turn back. I kept remembering a comment made to me when Iraq was invaded: If they did not hate us before, they are sure going to hate us now.The location shooting, combined with actual newsreel footage give this film a superb look which make it a great viewing experience, regardless of whether you feel that it is one-sided or unpatriotic. I hope that the film is shown on US TV on a widely seen channel, rather than an obscure channel which only preaches to the converted.

lastliberal This is the reality of the dictatorship that we live under today. George Bush and his neocons have completely discarded the rule of law and are engaging in torture to pursue their evil ends.This documentary shows what can happen not only to three Brits who were traveling to a wedding, but to anyone who lives in America under the present circumstances.The military, who are not to blame as they were just ignorant rednecks following orders, are made to be cartoon characters. The "interregators" are just like police everywhere, they lie and deceive just to get someone to confess. The fact that they have been unable to get a confession shows just how ridiculous they are. Bellieve me, I would have confessed to buggery under those conditions.Once we remove Bush from office in another 664 days, then Guantanamo should be closed and leveled to the ground so that not one stone sits atop another. It is too much to hope that Bush and his cohorts in crime would ever be borough to trial and punished as the war criminals they are for this sad chapter in our history.