Brainsbell The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

Bluebell Alcock Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

Fatma Suarez The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Roxie The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Rathko 'Gunner Palace' shows the kind of stories that should be on the nightly news. These stories shouldn't be a surprise, but they are. These soldiers, many uneducated and trained to do little more than get from point A to point B without dying, find themselves in a middle eastern city where they have to act as police officers, social workers, political advisers, security guards, probation officers, prison wardens, hospital orderlies, while all the while getting shot at and stoned by the people they are trying to help. Whether you believe in the war or not becomes irrelevant as you realize that these soldiers have been put in an impossible situation. They know it. The viewer knows it. The only person who doesn't seem to know it is Donald Rumsfeld, whose patronizing encouragement drones incessantly from armed forces radio in the background.The film takes place after the war, when the majority of casualties are the result of insurgent bombings, not legitimate warfare. Though we never see the results of such attacks, the effects are clear. The film also makes clear the incredible risks that Iraqis take in trying to create a peaceful democracy for themselves, and the price that many of them pay. Liberal complaints about the lack of violence, scenes of death, and wounded Iraqi civilians are unfounded, and are exposed as the childish and naive fantasies that they are. A flawed documentary that fails to create any real connection or empathy for the individuals involved, but a rare and compelling glimpse onto the streets of Baghdad, nonetheless.

gdamerow When the soldiers of "Gunner Palace" fall down laughing as a comrade explains to the filmmaker that the improvised armor on their Humvee, "Will probably slow down the shrapnel so that it stays in your body instead of going clean through. And that's about it!" Inexperienced film goers might be horrified. Yet this is a true aspect of life in the military.Watch, "Heartbreak Ridge", "Blackhawk Down" or even "MASH", or see the Canadian Arrows air show team around a piano singing a silly song about a pilot's parachute catching fire and falling to his death and you will see that soldiers under stress make fun of the very things that may kill them. It is their way of dealing with situations that are greatly less than ideal which keeps them sane.The subtlety of "Gunner Palace" may be missed by many. The constant use of the Armed Forces Radio voice-over, which continually drones on happily, and glibly about the success of the war while the soldiers experience the opposite is a huge key to the film's meaning. The official line that the soldier's government and commanders give them almost always contradicts their everyday experience. "I think it is a cluster F***, Sir," to quote Sgt. Highway (Clint Eastwood).And that is a reality of war that "Gunner Palace" truthfully tells. Our soldiers deserve the best but any army that goes to war, goes to war with the supplies it has, not always the supplies it wishes it had. Past history reveals that some mistakes in war are more damaging than others and the consequences oftentimes highly dependent on the strange twists of circumstance. Time will tell if the mistakes in Iraq will prove fatal or not.While some of the soldiers may come off as overbearing, Iraq is a combat zone and the movie portrays the US Army, not the Peace Corp. "The Army is a broad sword, not a scalpel." (Bruce Willis, "The Siege") No nineteen or twenty year old is going to be a philosopher king in a hostile situation.Some may debate for a long time whether or not, "Gunner Palace" is anti or pro war. Although I believe them to be fairly clear, appreciation of the film is not dependent at all on the directors' political views. Despite its rough edged story line, "Gunner Palace" is a successful attempt to show the real lives of the everyday soldier in Iraq and the irony and senselessness that war can oftentimes bring.

tucker-34 Like the majority of other media, this film shows war without the warfare. Not a single dead body -- Iraqi nor American -- is shown in the film. What is war without blood and death? That is what war is. To not convey this is to not tell the truth.There are verbal references to a few of the 1,827 American soldiers that have died during this war, and to the 23,000 to 100,000 Iraqi civilians that have been killed (depending on what source you use) but there's no raw visual footage that shows what words cannot convey.Instead of showing the full truth of war, the film focuses too much on soldiers partying around a clear blue swimming pool. It could make a great recruitment tool.

dj_bassett I ended up liking this quite a bit, although paradoxically the movie's greatest strength (an unwillingness to get wrapped up in the political arguments pro/con on the Iraq war, a willingness more or less to keep the vision down to the grunt's level) is also the movie's big weakness, as it often seems one or two steps removed from raw footage (in fact there's two false endings here, until finally the movie makers concede that they don't know how to end the thing....and then end it). The movie makers start the film suggesting this stuff should be on television and I agree; this really should be a very special "Primetime Live" or something.That said, the footage is superb, the sense of a grunt's life very well evoked, with individual personalities nicely delineated. For what it is, essentially journalism in documentary film fancy-dress, it's very well done. The movie makers took some real risk; one only wishes more journalists would do the same. I also liked the melange of hip-hop, Islam, metal guitar, doper humor, Army briskness, pop culture references and the like that the film portrays: I have a pet theory that the twenty-first century will be characterized by the multi-cultural stew that GUNNER PALACE and the like portray. Worth checking out.