Director: Jesse Moss, Tony Gerber Producer: Jesse Moss, Tony Gerber
“An indelible vision of modern war, a not-so-fun fun-house mirror of the Iraq occupation set in California’s Mojave Desert. The film is freaky, amusing, and sickening in equal measures – part fly-on-the-wall vérité, part multiple-perspective Altmanesque tragicomedy. A catastrophic farce, a let’s-pretend that ends with a mass deployment to hell.”
- DAVID EDELSTEIN, NEW YORK MAGAZINE
“Remarkably thorough and detailed. The film emphasizes the strangeness and complexity of the conflict.”
- AO SCOTT, THE NEW YORK TIMES
“Like any documentary about putting on a show, FULL BATTLE RATLE abounds with mirth provoking incongruities between the effect aimed for and the means used to achieve it. It’s ‘surreal comedy,’ as more than one reviewer characterized it when it premiered at the Berlin Film Festival. Somehow, though, I don’t much feel like laughing…One of the most complete pictures yet to emerge of how an Iraqi town fragments into civil war.”
- STUART KLAWANS, THE NATION
“A combat doc once removed from combat and twice mediated by stagecraft, FULL BATTLE
RATTLE depicts simulated war in a theme-park reality….One of the many surreal aspects of this fabulously disorienting movie: its representation of an Iraqi heaven that’s an American hell.”
RATTLE depicts simulated war in a theme-park reality….One of the many surreal aspects of this fabulously disorienting movie: its representation of an Iraqi heaven that’s an American hell.”
- J. HOBERMAN, VILLAGE VOICE
“No documentary I have seen better portrays the mutual suspicions and resentments of Americans and Iraqis. I still don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
- RICHARD WOODWARD, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
“Just when I thought I had heard everything about the war in Iraq, along comes FULL BATTLE RATTLE…The idea of spending big bucks on a phony war sounds like something out of the Marx Brothers’ DUCK SOUP, but the stakes are, of course, much higher…a stroke of a genius or a very expensive boondoggle.”
- V.A. MUSETTO, THE NEW YORK POST
“One of the most provocative documentaries about the ongoing war in Iraq…Gerber and Moss collected over 350 hours of footage which they’ve whittled down to a fascinating – and quite revealing – 85 minutes. The end result is a remarkable document.”
- KEN FOX, TV GUIDE
“Begins as surreal, almost goofball farce… ends on an ambiguous and haunting note, much closer to tragedy.”
- ANDREW O’HEHIR, SALON.COM
“An absolute peach. I’m not sure how they’ve been able to get away with this utterly stunning fly-on-wall piece about a “virtual reality Iraq” set up in the Mojave Desert to train American troops. It would be a sublime satire if it wasn’t horribly true. The deadly serious manner in which the American soldiers deal with all this nonsense gives rise to some of the greatest and most surreal comedy I’ve seen. I now know that the occupation of Iraq is utterly doomed.”
- JAMES CHIRSTOPHER, THE TIMES OF LONDON
“Full Battle Rattle is without a doubt the most bizarre film to emerge yet from the current Gulf conflict – an entertaining, often very funny, but ultimately revealing and unsettling film…”
- JONATHAN ROMNEY, SCREEN INTERNATIONAL
“The joker in the war-on-terror pack at Berlin was Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss’s Full Battle Rattle. This is a nonfiction movie about the Pentagon’s deployment of fiction. Deep in the Mojave Desert sits the jerry-built village of Medina Wasl. Here war games are acted out to help Iraq-bound regiments rehearse for reality. You would laugh if you didn’t feel you should more properly weep.”
- THE FINANCIAL TIMES
“The situation as sketched in Full Battle Rattles produces images that are on one side familiar, on the other strange, but all of them show, without the need of interviews or narration, the distance between the Americans’ intentions and the result for the Iraqis.”
- LE MONDE
“The film works on many levels, but its most shining success is showing the war, and rampant militarization in general, as an extremely complicated matter, one that cannot be boiled down to sound-bites and absolutes.”
- SPOUT
“A documentary in the purest sense of the word… An excellent piece.”
- AIN’T IT COOL NEWS
“Both an involving you-are-there documentary that looks at an unfamiliar subject and a question raising meditation on the way America deals with Iraq.”
- AUSTIN AMERICAN STATESMAN
“A multi-layered allegory for the current situation in Iraq.”
- AUSTIN CHRONICLE
External Links:
