7.1 | / 10 |
Users | 4.2 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
A young soldier escapes her small town by joining the military, only to find that she isn't going for a tour of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan as she hoped. Instead, she's assigned to guard duty at Guantanamo Bay. In the midst of numbing routine and constant abuse from the detainees under her charge, she develops an unexpected and ambivalent connection with one detainee who has been held at Gitmo for eight years.
Starring: Kristen Stewart, Tara Holt, Lane Garrison, Julia Duffy, John Carroll LynchDrama | 100% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.38:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 16-bit)
English: LPCM 2.0 (48kHz, 16-bit)
English SDH, Spanish
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (locked)
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 3.5 | |
Extras | 2.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Some topics are so politically and psychologically charged that it's impossible to tell stories about them. Just summarize the plot, and people will already know what they think, even if they never see the film. If they do happen to see it, their viewing will just confirm their initial assessment. Camp X-Ray is such a film. It recounts the experience of one American G.I. assigned to guard duty at the U.S. center for detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but the film makes no effort to evaluate the right or wrong of American policy or the guilt or innocence of the detainees. It simply explores one soldier's struggle to do a difficult job in a posting where, as her commanding officer says, no one is going to make any stars. "Nobody gives you a medal if you do it right, and they just give you a demotion when you do it wrong." Writer/director Peter Sattler, making his feature debut, spent a year researching and preparing Camp X-Ray, for which one of his principle sources was a cache of materials about Gitmo released through Wikileaks. The facility was recreated at an abandoned prison in Whittier, California. Sattler's previous experience was as a graphic artist and designer, including several films for director David Gordon Green, who served as executive producer on Camp X-Ray. While working on one of Green's films, Undertow, Sattler met Kristen Stewart, who later agreed to star as the buttoned-up private trying to do her best at Gitmo. As Ali, the prisoner who proves to be her most difficult charge, Sattler was fortunate enough to get Peyman Moaadi, the Iranian star of the Oscar-winning A Separation. The tense anti-chemistry between them—a state of war, as Ali says at one point—is essential to the impact of Camp X-Ray.
Camp X-Ray was shot on the Arri Alexa by James Laxton (Tusk) and finished on a digital intermediate. MPI Media's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray was presumably sourced directly from digital files. The image is sharp, clean and detailed, the effect of which, more often than not, is to bring into stark relief the spare barrenness of the prison facilities, for both the detainees and the soldiers. The colors are unrelentingly dim and faded at the prison, and the occasional palette shift, such as the more saturated hues accompanying a recreational fishing expedition, only serve to emphasize the dreariness of the Gitmo surroundings. Laxton and director Sattler make the most out of the setting's limitations, frequently reversing angles through cell door view ports, rotating camera positions as the guards make their rounds, and using overhead shots for variety. The Blu-ray image handles these changes of perspective capably, while also capturing the subtle shifts in expression that are essential to Sattler's long closeups on Stewart and Moaadi, as their characters study one another, each trying to work out what the other one is thinking. MPI has placed the 117-minute film on a BD-25, resulting in an average bitrate of 19.78 Mbps, which is lower than their usual compression reading, but MPI seems to have gotten away without creating any noticeable issues. It no doubt helps that the film was digitally originated and that it contains many static shots and still scenes of conversation.
Camp X-Ray's original 5.1 soundtrack, encoded on Blu-ray in lossless DTS-HD MA, conveys an effective sense of the somber prison environment that occasionally explodes with what I presume are protests, curses and cries of support in Arabic. Scenes on the bus that ferries the guards to and from Gitmo and in the cafeteria (technically, a mess hall, but it looks more like a cafeteria) also have a quietly effective surround presence. The dialogue is occasionally problematic. In some scenes, it can be difficult to understand, as if ADR (or "looping") was needed but couldn't be done for some reason, and only muffled production sound was available. In such instances, recourse to subtitles may be necessary (it was for me). The atmospheric score is by Jess Stroup, who is known primarily for his contributions to the scores of comedies like Horrible Bosses and Identity Thief. As is typical on MPI releases, an alternate PCM 2.0 soundtrack is available.
Because of its subject matter, Camp X-Ray is the kind of film onto which viewers and potential viewers may project many things that aren't actually there. When the release was first announced at Blu-ray.com, one comment read, simply: "total ISLAM TERRORIST sympathizing JUNK, no thx." I wonder what kind of film that commentator would suggest should be made about the soldiers serving at Gitmo. Should the detainees never be shown? Should the soldiers all be depicted as happy, cheerful, fulfilled, never suffering a moment's doubt or feeling sidelined and never for an instant wondering whether a detainee belongs there? Would such a portrayal even be credible, let alone interesting? Or should those soldiers just be ignored, because they're not really part of the war effort, just as PFC Cole comes to feel? In fact, Sattler's Camp X-Ray demonstrates the opposite, as Cole finds herself in what turns out to be a theater of war, just one very different from what she anticipated and with an enemy who isn't anything like she expected. We sympathize with her, as she tries to find her way. Highly recommended.
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