(USA, 77 min.)
Dir. Daniel Krauss
Programme: World
Showcase (International Premiere)
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| Photo by Dan Krauss. |
Fans of provocative exposés should add The Kill Team to their Hot Docs schedules. It’s a gut-wrenching
account of the horrors of war and the atrocities that come after.
The Kill Team
weaves between past and present by interviewing Adam, his parents, and two
fellow soldiers from his squad. The squad was dubbed “The Kill Team” because the
soldiers satisfied the blood lust that brought them to Afghanistan by devising
murders to fill the monotonous void of military work. The sensational nature of
the case made it a high-profile affair, but Adam’s desire to do the right thing
was not overlooked and the military greeted his inaction with a charge for
first-degree murder. He could serve the same number of years for the charge that
his peers received for pulling the trigger.
The stories offered by Adam’s former colleagues offer ample
justification for Adam’s fear. One soldier in particular explains his
involvements in the murders with matter-of-fact remorselessness. The Kill Team offers a brutalizing look
at a soldier’s psyche. There’s a hint of Full
Metal Jacket in the interviewees’ account of life in the field as they’re
turned into mechanical killers and cogs in an ideological machine. The stories
in The Kill Team show that Uncle Sam
has little room for men who question the actions of the superiors, as Adam’s
disapproval of the murders is equated to an act of cowardice, which is conveyed
as crime equal to or greater than the murders that sparked the trial.
While The Kill Team
smartly deconstructs the flaws in America’s military system, it also raises an
important moral conundrum to complicate Adam’s story. Does Adam deserve to be
punished for a failure to act? The situation is admittedly different from the
time that Jerry, Kramer, et al violated the Good Samaritan Act by choosing to
mock a man instead of intervening to help him, but Adam’s failure to act
implicates him as guilty for at least one death. Sitting idly by seems
indefensible when another man loses his life as a result.
The action of The Kill
Team does what Adam failed to do. It takes action without fear of the
consequences and exposes a necessary story in order to set things right. The
actions of the military proceedings, which seem more like a quick clean-up than
an attempt to correct a significant problem, no longer seem like a system for
justice.
The subject matter of The
Kill Team is undeniably harrowing, but the Krauss’s conventional approach
seems a bit too procedural to inspire the kind of radicalism one needs to
confront the steadfast Goliath of the military. The static talking heads
format, interjected by awkward cuts that abbreviate the testimony with
frustrating ellipses, is paired with observational looks at Adam’s legal battle
along with sensational photo evidence of the military murders. The descriptions
of the killings are brutal enough when voiced from the dead eyes of one of the
killers, but the uncensored images are unflinchingly graphic and a gratuitous
appeal to emotions.
At a quick seventy-seven minutes, The Kill Team delineates military mentalities as grossly inhuman
and philosophically suspect, but the verdict reached plays like a plea deal.
The final act resembles a closed proceeding, as it doesn’t really offer much
else beyond sharp judgement at the military's inexcusable tidying up of the problem. In comparison to last year’s Hot Docs entry The Invisible War, which went beyond its story-time and attacked
the system so thoroughly that it inspired change, The Kill Team might have trouble earning a higher rank.
Rating: ★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
The Kill Team screens:
Tuesday, April 30 – 8:15 at TIFF Bell Lightbox
Thursday, May 2 – 2:00 pm at the Hart House Theatre (U of T)
Friday, May 3 – 4:30 pm at TIFF Bell Lightbox
Please visit www.hotdocs.ca for more info on tickets,
films, and show times.
