Feral Jundi

   Check it out and let me know what you guys think?  I have yet to see the show, and I really don’t know how we will be depicted in this thing. I tend to not have much faith in today’s film industries out there, when it comes to presenting this industry in film. But you never know, and I will wait and see….-Matt

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Television Review | ‘Occupation’

Knocked Around by the Winds of War

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

October 16, 2009

War movies focus on friendship because it’s the one steadfast reward of combat and perhaps the only consolation.

“Occupation,” a British look at the Iraq war on BBC America on Sunday, is one of the best television depictions yet of that conflict, and it isn’t even a straightforward war story. Nor, despite its title, is it exactly a tale of foreign occupation, though “Occupation” does take a long, disturbing look at the chaos, corruption and mayhem that choked the American-led reconstruction effort.

Mostly the film follows three British soldiers who fought together in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and then, for three entirely different reasons, keep returning there over the course of several years. And in that time soldiers, contractors, engineers, doctors and government officials — and billions of dollars in vacuum-sealed packs — are pinned down by an insurgency their leaders failed to anticipate.

All three hope to do some good. Even the most cynical is hopelessly naïve. As he puts it, years into an occupation that was supposed to last only months, “There’s no right in this country, there’s just wrong and wronger.”

This isn’t a classic “Band of Brothers” tale of blood, bravery and comradeship under fire. It’s a powerful look at what happens to people who go to war and return to the surreality of real life, public buses, timecards, pubs and families who cannot understand the adrenaline rush of danger. It’s a modern twist on the 1946 classic “The Best Years of Our Lives”: these ordinary men who survived an extraordinary experience find reasons to return to the action.

“Occupation” has an impressive pedigree. Peter Bowker, the author of “Viva Blackpool,” wrote the script, and it was produced by the same team that made “Life on Mars” and “MI-5.” (“Viva Blackpool” and “Life on Mars” were British hits that flopped when they were adapted and remade into American series. “MI-5” played here originally on A&E and developed a loyal cult following.)

The narrative is well imagined and thoughtfully written, but it’s the performances that hold viewers’ attention. James Nesbitt plays Mike Swift, a career soldier who in Basra rescues a little girl injured in battle and becomes an overnight hero of the British tabloids, with headlines like “True Brit.”

Mike falls for Aliya (Lubna Azabal), the Iraqi doctor who took care of the girl and accompanied her to England for specialized treatment. When Aliya leaves, he tries to settle back in with his wife and children and forget her but fails, and he sets out to find her in Iraq by signing up as a medic.

Danny (Stephen Graham) is a cheeky, restless man, the kind who calls strangers “mate” and doesn’t have close relationships, but who discovers in combat that he has the right stuff under fire; he stays calm when everyone else goes wiggy. Danny craves the rush, and back home finds that getting high doesn’t help.

He and a burly American veteran, Erik Lester (Nonso Anozie), form their own security company, Pacific Solutions. Mike scoffingly calls them mercenaries. Danny prefers a more benign title: “risk management operatives.”

Danny is in it for the excitement and the money (as much as $1,000 a day), but he recruits the young, less experienced Lee Hibbs (Warren Brown) by appealing to Hibbs’s idealism: he doesn’t have many job prospects at home, and he wants his overseas service to count for something. Lester is a persuasive pitchman, telling Hibbs and others that working as a private security contractor is “your chance to put things right for the Iraqis, for yourselves and for those comrades who were killed or injured.”

It’s a novel take on the war. Most of the more memorable dramas set in Iraq, like Steven Bochco’s 2005 series “Over There” and “Generation Kill,” a 2008 HBO series made by the creative team behind “The Wire,” focused primarily on the invasion, chronicling the horrors — and weird grace notes — of combat rather than the moral complexities of a fractured peace.

Not everything here is original, though. The first battle scene — the British soldiers are unceremoniously thrown into a raging firefight in a Basra apartment complex — is tense, thrilling and suddenly undercut by the swell of sweet, elegiac music: “Teardrop” by Massive Attack. The counterpoint of sublime music and savage combat has become a staple of war movie soundtracks, what the composer Robert Kraft, the president of Fox Music, calls “the ‘Platoon’ effect,” referring to the way so many filmmakers have copied Oliver Stone’s use of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” in “Platoon.”

Music can ennoble a battle scene or serve as an ironic disclaimer, bringing a note of righteous disapproval to what could otherwise look like crassly enjoyable violence. Either way it has become trite, and here especially it is intrusive.

The writers even borrow from “Casablanca.” Mike is heartbroken when Aliya suddenly vanishes, returning to Iraq without warning or farewell. Much later she tells him that she was married all along, but believed, like Ilsa, that her imprisoned husband was dead; when she got word while in London that he was released and alive, she felt she had to go to him. After Mike tracks her down in Basra, Aliya gives her own version of the “hill of beans” speech. “Do you really think what happens to you and me is more important than that?” she asks, referring to the crazy mixed-up world of Iraq.

The film is better at small details. A jeep passes, without stopping, a man on the side of the road, his shirt soaked in blood, hollering into his cellphone as if on line with the AAA; relatives look away uncomfortably as three comrades, back home for the first time, share a hug that lasts a few more seconds than English reserve permits.

Mike, Danny and Hibbs return to Iraq believing they now know what they are getting into, and keep getting sucked deeper into a sectarian conflict and an alien culture they can never fathom. It’s a complex tragedy with Shakespearean undertones and odd ripples of humor, but it’s also the most contemporary story of Iraq told on television.

OCCUPATION

BBC America, Sunday night at 8, Eastern and Pacific times; 7, Central time. Produced by Kudos Film and Television, BBC America and the BBC. Written by Peter Bowker; directed by Nick Murphy; Laurie Borg, producer; Derek Wax, executive producer for Kudos; Patrick Spence, executive producer for the BBC.

WITH: James Nesbitt (Mike Swift), Stephen Graham (Danny Peterson), Warren Brown (Lee Hibbs), Lubna Azabal (Dr. Aliyah Nabi), Nonso Anozie (Erik Lester), Igal Naor (Dr. Sadiq Alasadi), Laura Donnelly (Katy Hibbs), Lewis Alsamari (Yunis) and Khalid Laith (Abdel Allawi).

Story here.

Youtube trailer here.