Film Review: 'Camp X-Ray'
Peter Sattler's Gitmo-set drama - starring Kristen Stewart - doesn't exactly soar, but it still represents a valiant effort by all involved.
At first glance, it’s easy to write off Peter Sattler’s new film, Camp X-Ray – starring Kristen Stewart and set in Guantanamo Bay - as little more than your average Hollywood vanity project. Just watch as haters accuse the writer/director and his polarizing star of everything from misrepresentation to dilettantism– all before they’ve even seen a minute of the movie.
Sucks for them. Sure, the pair is working a bit beyond their depth, but Camp X Ray is still the type of film that simply doesn’t get made often enough anymore; a balanced attempt to portray a complex issue helmed by artists for whom raising questions rather than clubbing an audience over the head with answers is truly paramount.
If you think you’ve got a bad-first-day-on-the-job story, Army Private First Class, Amy Cole (Stewart) most definitely has you beat. Seeking to serve the country that she loves and get the hell out of her small, dead end town, the young soldier had enlisted with expectations of joining the frontline in Iraq. Instead, she’s been stationed at Gitmo, the United States’ ever controversial sorta prison off the coast of Cuba—where in the first 24 hours, she is verbally harassed and physically assaulted.
Her fellow soldiers – including the cocksure Ransdell (played by Prison Break’s Lane Garrison) instantly write her off as weak. The religiously devout, gender secluded detainees (don’t call them prisoners) whom she’s responsible for keeping alive are morally incensed by her presence. Oh yeah, and her mom thinks she joined the army just to meet eligible men.
But it’s all good, because despite her frail stature and solitary status, Private Cole believes wholeheartedly in her mission– she’s helping to bring justice to the terrorists who caused 911 – and nothing is going to derail her from this… Until she meets the eloquent if imploding Ali (Peyman Moaadi), an 8-year Gitmo detainee who – like many others – insists he’s being falsely imprisoned for his faith. Of course, as Guantanamo Bay is strictly considered a ‘detention camp’ – at least by the US – and not a prison at all, there is little by way of this argument. But that doesn’t stop the desperate man from voicing it and when he and Cole forge an unlikely friendship, she too finds herself wondering if things are as black and white in this ‘War On Terror’ as she had once thought.
The young private’s dilemma is one many of us have faced over and over again since that fateful day in September some 13 years ago when the world changed forever and the word terrorism truly went viral. But just because it’s been discussed ad nauseam on cable news programs and in blog posts for over a decade now, it doesn’t mean that we as a country – or as a world for that matter - are any closer to understanding our shared responsibility and blame for the bloodshed. Despite his inexperience as a filmmaker, Sattler’s movie succeeds because he’s not afraid to confront this issue head on.
He’s not afraid to confront the real questions: Is our supposed safety worth the violation of human rights? Is this good guy/bad guy concept of war an antiquated one? Are basic human rights inalienable? And in his actors, both Mooadi and Stewart, he has found artists willing to fully go there with him. Say what you will about the former Twilight star, but she most certainly has the soul of a creative, continuing to choose bold, exciting projects that raise questions, invoke ire, or are occasionally misunderstood.
And regardless of what you think about Guantanamo Bay and the way the US has run it for 11 years, Camp X Ray is certainly one such endeavor.
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