One Marine feels as though he’s playing “Grand Theft Auto” while shooting from a Humvee in Iraq. Another says he gets more nervous watching a game show on television than in the midst of killing in Iraq.
Today’s Marine is a post- 9/11, video-game-savvy fighting machine who can identify with screen reality more easily than with anything he may have heard about the “Greatest Generation.”
“Generation Kill,” a seven-part HBO miniseries beginning tonight, is a riveting true account of the war from the perspective of the boots on the ground, the jaded hip-hop-listening fighting men who have grown accustomed to big lies from their government, defective equipment and civilian targets.
Few of us would willingly ride along with Marines in Iraq, even via television. It’s a hard sell: The topic is too downbeat, the politics too loaded, the visuals too gruesome. And summertime is more traditionally left to escapist TV fun.
But with the war too easily ignored these days, “Generation Kill,” tonight at 7, feels something like a cultural imperative. This is how America is prosecuting a faraway war; this is how America is losing hearts and minds. In fact, this is how Arabs from surrounding countries who weren’t there before have come to Iraq to wage jihad against invading Americans.
The Marines of the First Recon Battalion emerge in colorful individual portraits. The nonfiction drama closely follows the book by embedded reporter Evan Wright, originally published as a three- part series in Rolling Stone. The film was written and produced by David Simon, the creator of “The Wire.”
Judging by the first five hours available for preview, this well-acted work is smart but not easy.
The nerve-fraying rigors of Marine life are intimately depicted. Lack of sleep and what passes for food, malfunctioning equipment, constant obscenities amid absurd levels of machismo. … Observing contradictory orders and a general lack of coherence in their missions, they are prone to grimly ironic humor.
These guys are elite, well-trained killing machines, products of million-dollar-per-person training programs stuck doing decoy duty in Iraq. Like Ferraris at a demolition derby, they say, they are overqualified and underutilized in absurd situations with inexplicable orders, unstable leadership and a tough-to-distinguish enemy. The rules of engagement change capriciously. The guns jam and the radios don’t work.
As they roll into the next Iraqi hamlet and proceed to “light it up,” they note that piles of enemy ordinance have been left untouched in the desert while they’ve just destroyed the only schoolroom in the town. “Am I missing something?” one asks.
Other lines are more pedantic: “Man, we keep making the same f—ing mistakes,” another observes. “Not that we’re doing any better than the French in Indochina.”
The characters are vivid personalities (the impossibly fit Rudy Reyes plays himself; reporter Wright is played with shivering fear by Lee Tergesen), while the descriptions of the fog of war are spookily familiar. It’s dusty desert not humid jungle, but “Apocalypse Now” parallels are obvious.
Steven Bochco tried to interest a dozing America in a blunt dramatic look at the war in Iraq with the excellent “Over There” on FX. The audience avoided contact. Now Simon and Ed Burns, who delivered the penetrating study of decaying urban America that was “The Wire” on HBO, have assembled a great cast in a tough seven-part series about the lack of clarity and understanding at all levels that is the war in Iraq.
Imagine the country turning away from “Grand Theft Auto” and TV game shows long enough to pay attention.
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com
