Battle for Haditha (2007)

As a film about war, this was a good one. It was low budget and shot in a stylized way. The acting is really well done and it comes off almost as a documentary film (I will get to that in a moment). The filming locations are great (Jordan) the equipotent used in the movie is also pretty true to form. It was a low budget movie with no real known stars, and I give the whole crew, cast, director and everyone involved props for putting together a great movie.Now for the bad news. It is just an anti-American, anti-war propaganda film. That is it. It is a convincing one and they worked really hard to try and make it look as close to a documentary as they could, but it is just propaganda. These events did occur, and I have no real doubt that some Marines may have been guilty of some form of Geneva Convention crimes, but this film sets out with a clear agenda in which a lot of time and effort is put into justifying the actions of insurgents, and trying to give the civilian populations a pass on not reporting insurgent activity. They seem to ignore a lot of what the Marines involved said and pretty much took the Iraqi civilians' words as the honest truth.Towards the end, in order to not make to many fighting men and women angry they even try the new anti-war tactic of trying to pose one of the Marines as a victim. The Anti-war movements choice of spitting on American Soldiers in Veitnam doesn't work anymore so they try to paint our soldiers as victims now.Unless you were there, witnessed what happened, and have no feeling toward one side or the other, don't represent something as fact when to this day we only have conjecture.

There are so many major compromising factors and inaccuracies, I have lost count. The movie in it's essence is fictional in every way. If you do you your research on Haditha you may end up being extremely disappointed at how upside down this movie is.In regards to the undertones of sympathy. The movie does portray actions and reactions from both sides. This is an innocent approach, if it were accurate! You must take into consideration that at the time, the attacks against the marines were conducted by LARGE groups of insurgents. The fabricated thought of a massacre initiated by two insurgents' IED is just obviously unrealistic. This has more sympathetic undertones to the two insurgents as opposed to the marines. Again, this would not be a bad thing if the movie was accurate. All in all it tends to be more sympathetic to the struggles of the insurgent.Another important factor is the over simplification of the story. It is the portrayal of a reaction from one event. Haditha had several events that lead to the mass influx of counterinsurgency. There's a reason why its called the "Battle of Haditha", because it was a battle! Not a little post-IED ambush. There were HUGE amounts of Insurgency and Coalition, hence why it is often compared to Fallujah. The story of Haditha is much more complicated, and it's frustrating that the director summed it up in such a black and white-tunnel visioned fashion.And here's me losing my composure.... For crying out loud people! Don't assume it's factual! It's really not a fair insight. It almost portrays U.S. forces as blood thirsty murderers at the same level as the SS. That's really not the case. Take it from an OIF veteran and just look it up! You didn't have to be there to know how extremely wrong this movie is!

I just saw this movie and found it very moving. I have spent some time with Iraq veterans and I feel this movie did a very accurate job portraying what they went through.I think it's important to point out that 12 of the actors, including Ruiz, who plays Corporal Ramirez, are themselves Iraq veterans. Here are some quotes from Ramirez: "I was 17 when I was sent to Iraq, during the initial invasion. We pushed all the way up to Tikrit and I ended up being wounded, I almost lost my life. It's crazy, people don't know the type of things that we go through. That's what I like about the film, it shows that." The concept of taking Iraq refugees and ex-marines to make a movie with no script is brilliant. I felt the improvisation from these actors was likely better and more realistic than anything professional actors could have pulled off. I was also impressed with the production values, especially since no US funds were available for a fair and honest portrayal of such events.

People who live in denial and believe in the fairy tale of US troops bringing "freedom" to backward Iraqis will hate this movie. But what makes this movie particularly valuable, moving, and powerful is that it humanizes all the participants in the war: US troops, insurgents, and civilians caught up in the crossfire. The director made a genuine effort to show the horrors of war without presenting a simplistic black vs. white, "us" vs "them", opposition. All the protagonists are ordinary people, people who may do horrible things, but people in the end. The insurgents who planted the IED feel remorse at what hey did, and the Marines who killed civilians are also haunted by what they did. And both are ultimately manipulated by their superiors, who really don't care about the suffering on the ground. And the message of the movie is also clear: the root of all this horror is an invasion that should not have happened in the first place.