Generation Kill Review

Evan Wright rode in the lead Humvee of Bravo Company, 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, through the 2003 invasion, and Simon and Burns adapt his book without imposing a story on it. There is no score and no conventional arc, just a column of lightly armoured vehicles pushed further and faster than a reconnaissance unit was ever meant to go, under commanders whose orders range from sound to lethal.

The Marines talk constantly, about pop songs, race, sex, their officers and the war, and the dialogue, profane, very funny and often shocking, is the best thing here. Alexander Skarsgård's precise, unflappable Brad Colbert, James Ransone's motor-mouthed Ray Person and Lee Tergesen's watchful reporter lead a cast of twenty-eight, and the officers above them, Captain America above all, are drawn with a precision that stings. Almost all the music is what the men sing themselves.

Susanna White and Simon Cellan Jones shot it over six months in southern Africa with a documentary eye, and Ivan Strasburg's photography makes the desert monotonous in the right way. The flat structure has a cost: the characters blur, and the war's larger meaning is left for the viewer to assemble. Critics compared it to The Wire, and the comparison holds.