Camp X-Ray creates a refreshing, delicate story about the War on Terror. Written and directed by Peter Sattler, the film explores a friendship between one guard and detainee during the operating years of Guantanamo Bay. The film’s fragility isn’t apparent through action as it is by an inexorable sense of hopelessness and pointlessness for all involved.
Think of all the movies that have been made about 9/11 in the past decade.
World Trade Center (Oliver Stone 2006) and United 93 (Paul Greengrass 2006) both illustrate the struggles and heroism of ordinary people on the ground and on the hijacked planes. Disney Channel released Tiger Cruise in 2004, a film about a military family aboard a naval ship when they find out about the attacks. Remember Me (Allen Coulter 2010) used 9/11 as a backdrop for a coming-of-age story starring Robert Pattinson.
The most well-known film of late is the Oscar-nominated “greatest manhunt in history” for Osama bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow 2012).
Although these films all possess different perspectives regarding the events, they share a similar agenda of ennobling the American people devastated by the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks. This has been the major method adopted by all forms of media—movies, books and news—over the years.
Camp X-Ray, however, demonstrates a step in a different direction.
One of the first things that come to mind when we think of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp is the torture tactics used to collect information from alleged terrorists. But instead of water boarding, Camp X-Ray shows the realities of caged confinements, sleep deprivation and force-fed hunger strikers.
The film doesn’t depict detainees as extreme enemies apart from aggressively shouting in un-translated Arabic and one scene where feces is thrown at newbie guard Amy Cole (Kristen Stewart).
Allowing the narrative to exist outside of repeated extremes created a breathing space for a crossroads of two people from different worlds—an American female soldier and a Muslim detainee—to meet.
Stewart and Peyman Moaadi, who plays the detainee Ali Amir, are a formidable pair. They both live up to the acting challenge their respective characters face: bridging the gaps of culture, circumstance and prejudices through only their exchanges via a small glass window.
These exchanges are laden with an entirely sympathetic agenda most viewers won’t see in other post-9/11 films.
We never officially know what actions brought Ali to Guantanamo Bay, but he displays unswerving conviction in his innocence. We do know that he goes on long tirades about not getting to read the last Harry Potter book and finding out if Snape is a good guy or not. He also brushes up his hair in anticipation to talking to Amy, or “Blondie,” as he calls her, and drawing meticulous patterns around his self-made Sudoku puzzles.
Yet Ali is convinced about the fact that Amy—and the audience—can’t fully comprehend the hell he endures. When Amy later tells him that the new guards will learn that all detainees aren’t necessarily evil, Ali says to her, “What did you learn? What do you think you know? You know nothing about me. You and me, we are at war.” In another scene, he says, “Look at me. You are asking me, why do I want to die? But you don’t even see that I’m not even living.”
Likewise, the film shows sensitivity to the plight of women in the military. Amy, again and again, must prove herself as “one of the guys.” When she avoids watching Ali strip naked to take a shower, Ransdell (Lane Garrison) asks, “Are you a soldier, or are you a female soldier?”
Ali and Amy’s friendship blossoms with sincerity, but the film is careful to show that nothing else will change. The final image of new guards making the continuous rounds of the small cell block reinforces the fact that the war is over but we are still on alert.
“Kettering” by The Antlers, the only song in the enitre film, plays throughout the ending scenes. The soft keyboard notes weave through Peter Silberman warbling, “I wish that I had known in that first minute we met, the unpayable debt that I owed you … and I didn’t believe them when they told me that there was no saving you.” It forlornly emphasizes the main relationship of the film, and the bleak act of reaching out but failing to change a damaging system.
