Click here to read our interview with Phil Donahue and Tomas Young

Body of War

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

We're finally nearing the end of the Hollywood studios' annual process of dumping their junk films into theaters during the year's first quarter. But before you get into full-on summer mode and start freaking out about Iron Man, you should see Body of War, a film with two qualities that have been sorely lacking in most 2008 films so far: passion and intelligence.

Yep, it's a documentary about the Iraq War, a subject that will no doubt inspire many to avoid the film at all costs. But even if only anti-Bush documentary hounds see the movie, it won't just be preaching to the choir, because the story it tells casts the entire conflict in an under-explored light.

Body of War plays as a good companion to No End in Sight, last year's level-headed, well-researched critique of the Iraq invasion. While that film explained all of the agonizingly avoidable mistakes made – building the case to invade on suspicious intelligence, disbanding the Iraqi army, and plenty more – Body of War focuses on the other side, the human aspect, embodied by a paralyzed veteran named Tomas Young. Both films will make you very angry.

Young enlisted in the army on September 13th, 2001 after seeing Bush, standing in the rubble of Ground Zero, giving his speech about smiting out all the evildoers. He was 25 and had been in Iraq for a week when he was shot in the spine, leaving him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life and providing him with side effects like the inability to cough.

The film follows his troubled recovery and involvement in the anti-war protest movement, periodically switching back to footage of Congress debating the resolution to authorize Bush to invade Iraq. "Debating" is a loose term here; the footage is cut together like one of those quick Daily Show montages of supposedly intelligent politicians repeating each others' rhetoric over and over again: "We cannot wait for the final proof that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." "If we leave Saddam unchecked, the result could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." "We could be facing a mushroom cloud." And so on.

There are a few voices of reason, led by the now ninety-year-old senator Robert Byrd, who begs his peers not to rush through the resolution and give the president power that the Constitution specifically gives the Legislature. Young's antiwar efforts eventually lead him to meet Byrd in the climax of the film, giving the two opposing strands some cohesion.

The point of the