Armadillo

 

Armadillo’s approach to the war in Afghanistan is nominally non-political, but the film was nonetheless the subject of much debate in Denmark due to the contentious actions of its subjects, the young soldiers of the titular Helmand base. Armadillo possesses the momentum of a tightly-scripted fiction. In keeping with the Chekhovian dictum that a gun shown in Act 1 should later be fired, an early briefing regarding the ‘rules of engagement’ portends their subsequent (apparent) violation. This narrative economy, coupled with Lars Skree’s stylised cinematography, makes it easy to overlook the genuine risks taken, but it does permit an expressionistic edge atypical of observational documentaries. This produces one of the most potent edits of the War on Terror’s onscreen depictions to date: as an off-duty soldier ‘relaxes’ with a first-person shooter, the image cuts from his avatar lobbing a grenade to a real-life explosion, a bravura condensation of one of modern warfare’s most unsettling traits. [Chris Buckle]