"Generation Kill" pulls off the Iraq War story

Difficult balance: Generation Kill plays out the thrill of combat, set against the wanton waste of life and senselessness of the battles being fought.

It doesn’t seem like it’s time yet to be watching television and films about the Iraq War for entertainment, does it? It is, after all, still dragging on, and if the electronic media weren’t mostly mirroring the inevitable fatigue many home-front Americans feel, we could watch the real thing on the news every night. And even casual film fans know the lore that it took years for Hollywood to be able to handle the Vietnam War with anything like success; the feeble first attempts to make Iraq War features have kept audiences away in droves and made such distance seem like a necessary rule. Perhaps that’s why one of the most well-made and timely television productions of 2008 seemed to land without a sound, with little water-cooler chatter to its credit and no serious media buzz to its name. The recent DVD release of Generation Kill offers a chance to put this situation right.

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