Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.0

Camp X-Ray Blu-ray Movie Review

A Soldier's Story

Reviewed by Michael Reuben June 30, 2015

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.

Sattler opens Camp X-Ray with a sustained image of one of the Twin Towers in flames, a still-shocking sight that serves as a critical orientation for the viewer. Although the film is an intimate drama with a relatively small cast, everything that occurs flows from the events of 9/11. The opening forces the viewer to take a moment and re-visit that day.

A jaggedly edited sequence shows the 2002 capture of Ali (Moaadi) and his transfer to Gitmo, where he is known only as "471". Like the soldiers who guard him, we do not know why he was deemed a threat, and we never learn whether he was really a terrorist. "471" will tell one of the guards that he has been proven blameless, but Sattler provides no confirmation either way. Camp X-Ray is not about adjudicating guilt.

Eight years later, PFC Amy Cole (Stewart) is deployed to Gitmo for guard duty. On her first day of orientation by Cpl. "Randy" Ransdell (Lane Garrison), Cole wins credibility by volunteering to help subdue a detainee named Mahmoud (Marco Khan), the de facto leader in the block to which she is assigned. She gets elbowed in the face, knocked down and spat on, but she takes it in stride as a kind of initiation.

Slowly and deliberately, Camp X-Ray traces Cole's path as she learns a guard's job, in which her chief responsibility is not to prevent escape—the walls do that, as Cpl. Lansdell explains—but to keep the detainees alive. (They are called "detainees", not "prisoners", because "prisoners" would be subject to the Geneva Conventions.) The biggest challenge, Cole quickly discovers, is the numbing boredom of routine, a challenge that the guards share with their charges, except that the guards can rotate out after a year, while the detainees remain indefinitely. As a result, they have become experts at creating distraction out of the least likely elements, including hunger strikes, every form of human excretion and, of course, harassment of guards in any way possible. Cole and the other guards are warned to avoid conversation with detainees, but some of the inmates can be wickedly persistent and inventive, particularly "471".

The exchanges between Cole and "471" don't qualify as "conversations". They occur as much in the silences as in the words. This is especially true after an early exchange that involves a noxious prank, which makes subsequent contacts fraught with reserve and uncertainty. Though she would never admit this to her fellow soldiers, or even to her senior commander, Colonel Drummond (John Carroll Lynch of Zodiac and Body of Proof), Cole is disappointed with life in the Army, because she joined it to leave small-town routine behind her for something grander and more inspiring. Instead, she finds herself stuck in an equally provincial setting where the biggest novelty is whatever distraction, verbal or otherwise, is offered by detainee "471" that particular day.

Cole's growing interest (for lack of a better word) in "471" does not escape the notice of her immediate superior, Ransdell, who is also nursing a grudge because she rejected his advances. To Sattler's credit, however, the director does not take on the hot-button topic of sexual harassment in the military, but simply uses the personal conflict as a narrative device to explore additional elements of Cole's situation, as she is forced into unpleasant duties, transferred to the night shift and invokes a complaint procedure that results in a lot of paperwork and not much else.

Because he has no issue-driven agenda, Sattler brings Camp X-Ray to a close without trying to resolve Cole's life choices or settle "471's" situation as a detainee, either of which would be a tall order. However, because the film is a personal story, Sattler is able to arrange a satisfying conclusion that arises naturally from the experiences of these specific characters. That's the job of a good dramatist. The rest is up to the viewer.

Camp X-Ray Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

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 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

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.

Camp X-Ray Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Making Of (1080p; 1.78:1; 12:29): This informative EPK includes interviews with Sattler, Stewart, Moaadi, Garrison and Lynch, all of whom provide intriguing insights into the challenges of making a small-scale character drama in a politically charged setting.



• Trailer (1080p; 2.38:1; 2:20).



• Additional Trailers: At startup the disc plays trailers for Kelly & Cal, God's Pocket, On the Road and Comet, which can be skipped with the chapter forward button and are not otherwise available once the disc loads.

Camp X-Ray Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

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.