Armadillo (Denmark, 2010)
The most talked about movie in Scandinavia right now, and hopefully in the rest of the world soon! Janus Metz’s documentary film follows a platoon of Danish solders in Afghanistan for several months. Why are these young men traveling to the other side of the world to fight and die in a war that has nothing to do with them? What could easily be another “war is hell, ice is cold” documentary becomes so much more in the hand of Metz. He remains objective and unsentimental to the extent of not featuring any interviews or narrator in the film. Instead the cameraman is one member of the platoon, following them everywhere they go, including battlefield. This gives Armadillo an extremely cinematic feel and structure, not to mention the almost unbearable tension in the “battle scenes”. The cinematographer, fully armed to protect his own life, gets involved in the gunfights and is lucky not getting hit by any of the bullets that seriously wound some other soldiers right next to him. Armadillo also creates a very interesting comparison piece to Samuel Maoz’s Venice Winner Lebanon (2009). While Maoz stated, based on his own experience, that war is hell that you will never want to experience again, Armadillo shows how many of the soldiers in fact enjoy the adrenaline rush of it. Many of them returned home, only to sign up for 2011 comeback to Afghanistan. It’s no wonder the film has been an eye opener and somewhat of a small scandal to the public in its native country. Technically a documentary, Armadillo should be treated as what it truly is: a superb movie that happens to be 100% reality.
