Customer Reviews

Occupation: Dreamland

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

We've all seen so much of the debate for and against the war, the glamorous hollywood depictions, the local hero eulogies in our home towns, but this is the first movie that I've known of that lets the soldiers speak for themselves. It's important and truly fascinating to see what really goes on in Iraq, day to day on the streets and in the bunk rooms. Everybody says they support the troops but it's so easy to forget that they're a diverse group of individuals with dreams, fears, and opinions about this work that they're doing. It's also really interesting to see them interact with the Iraqi citizens and to get their view on the occupation.
As a person with a close family member recently sent home after getting injured in Iraq, these soldiers really ring true to me. I was happy to get to know them a little bit through this film. These men and women are slowly returning and picking up their lives. If we truly support them, we will make an effort to understand what they've been through as we welcome them back home.

I really found this film affecting. It is not partisan or simplistic. It respects our troops by listening and being there. The military team the audience gets to hang with is strikingly diverse on every level. I walked out of the theater thinking that insight is more interesting than "answers". Every American should see this film.

Two primary thoughts I would convey about Occupation Dreamland: 1) It's very real. This is not a typical war film... it embraces reality with two arms wrapped around it and brings you inside a situation that is on the brink of chaos. 2) No matter which side of the political debate you reside on, Dreamland is a film you ought to see.

Going into this movie I was expecting a tired rendition of war-time life. Instead I found a gripping portrait of a number of brave soldiers who were burdened with fighting an enemy they could not see or find. This movie offers a window into the real situation in iraq- one uncluttered by the overblown pomposity of the nightly news. See this movie!!!

In response to the reviewer who calls the soldiers in Gunner Palace a bunch of whining support soldiers: those "whining support soldiers" spent 420 days in Iraq, fought from Baghdad to Najaf, lost 4 soldiers in combat operations and took nearly 60 wounded in action. By no means are they whining. And, since when is artillery considered support? Get your facts straight.

As for Dreamland, it shows a very different group of people in a different place. It's a worthwhile film, but I think that given what happened in Falluja, it doesn't answer many questions about how Falluja became what it is. The filmmakers approach is softball. The actions and tactics of the 82nd led to many of the problems in Falluja.

Look, it's a shame, man, that you can't trust the mainstream media as a source of what's really goin' down in Iraq, whether it be perceptions of a liberal press or the "patriotic" renderings of the Fox network. And dang, I hope you know you can't take at face value anything the White House is dishing up. So take an up-close and extended look for yourself by watching this film here. There ain't no hidden agenda here, friends, just some real time spent with a company of our soldiers, a varied group of kids dealing with a tough situation in a variety of ways.

I first watched this movie while stationed just a few miles from the city of Falluja itself in 2008. It was shocking and honest in a way that "documentaries" are no longer usually portrayed. It was not some sort of anti-war propaganda spewed by a leftest European commentator. It is a video chronology of everything that happened to one specific unit of soldiers prior to the first battle for Falluja. The words are not spoken by the film maker, and no agenda is forced. The words are mainly from the soldiers, and occasionally from the civilians, and possibly insurgents (at least they were mad enough to be insurgents). The events are tragic and disheartening to the viewer and the soldiers involved, but what a normal civilian viewer might not notice is everything that was being done wrong. By 2008, long after the second battle of Falluja, and after "The Surge", so many lessons had been learned from the blood, sweat, and tears from deployments like the one in "Occupation: Dreamland", that it seemed like the events in this documentary were unimaginable. "Dreamland" is like a crash course in the "why" of modern tactics. It shows, from top to bottom, everything that should NEVER be done in current COIN or urban operations, before anyone ever wrote down the right way. The wrong responses to IED's, the wrong tactics for patrolling, the wrong attitudes of command, the wrong way to do everything. By the end of the movie, you might feel like clearly the city of Falluja is doomed to be a hotbed of terrorism in Iraq, and that US efforts to quell the area are hopeless. Except for the fact that the city has been relatively quiet for years. Combat troops pulled out of Falluja before most other large population centers. I know, I watched huge convoys of Marines head home from a rather quiet Camp Falluja. Now, Falluja looks nothing even remotely like the violent, decrepit, hotbed of terrorism that it looks like in "Dreamland". It's a documentary of the "bad old days" when no body seemed to know what to do or how to fix what was wrong, but we do now. If you plan on being deployed anytime soon, you'll be getting trained on Escalation of Force procedures, COIN, and MOUT operations. The lessons you learn during your training will answer all of the terrible problems that come up watching the documentary. This way you'll know to take the pre-deployment lessons seriously because they were written in the blood, sweat, and tears of these soilders.

This film really shows the average experiences of the infantry in Iraq. I am a Soldier with 2 tours in Iraq and there is no other documentary that covers the war that I can relate to like this. It follows a squad from the 82nd Airborne on their day to day lives pulling missions in Fallujah. It really gives you a feel what it is like to deal with the Iraqis and the soldier's feelings on it. From combat missions to reenlistment briefings this film puts you in the lower enlisted and junior NCO's shoes.

A lot of the other reviews were saying things about it being anti-war and I completely disagree. You get a lot of honest comments from the Soldier's and Iraqi civilians, it's honesty, not anti-war. It's funny how combat troops on the ground have more empathy for people that are potentially trying to kill them than Americans 10,000 miles away.

A few other films that cover this war that are worth watching;

Combat Diary The Marines of Lima CO, this is an unfortunate story and every American should hear it. These Marines dealt with the worst case scenerio and somehow drove on.

Gunner Palace, this film shows how support troops live in Iraq. These guys are an embarrassment to the US Army, however it is still acurate on how a lot of troops live in Iraq

What I love about this film is no one is really able to call this a "right" or "left" film. It is truly the soldier side of things. If you want an intimate look at what US soldiers put up with, this will give you a realistic glimpse. Recruitment in war by retention officers, putting up with crappy out-dated equipment, and generally having the internal issues of dealing with a country you don't know and a mission that's not clear.



Do not take recommendations for "Gunner Palace" because it is a sorry excuse for a realistic look at soldiers. I say this from a perspective of serving 8 years in the US Army. In "Gunner Palace" you get a glimpse of what is wrong with the military, which is a spoiled bunch of complaining support soldiers. They sit in literally in a palace and complain. On the other hand in "Occupation: Dreamland" real soldiers, infantry soldiers, deal with the usual heartaches and dangers with relative bravery that you would expect.



If you want a recommendation for something to watch in conjunction with "Occupation Dreamland" I suggest "Why We Fight," "The Fog of War - Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara," and "Control Room."

Hollywood just isn't making movies right now. In a pile of DVD "screeners", I stumbled upon a plain white DVD entitled "Occupation: Dreamland". I had no idea it was about Iraq or Fallujah or anything like that. It sounded like a Discovery Channel Special on Nellis Air Force base (Area 51 a.k.a. "Dreamland").

Make no mistake, Occupation: Dreamland turns out to be an anti-war film, but largely by accident, since at the time the filmmakers couldn't possibly have predicted the confluence of events that spawned all of the chaos in Fallujah, Iraq culminating with the Marines basically leveling the whole town.

Two events happen off-screen in Dreamland that set the tone of the whole film. An Iraqi woman is arrested and taken into custody by the 82nd Airborne (Army) and a U.S. solider is killed on patrol by an improvised explosive device. These events cause so much distrust between the locals and the Americans patrolling the streets that the two jobs of finding insurgents while making friends of the locals become near impossible.

What is strange is that the mission of finding and detaining insurgents pretty much entails breaking into people's homes in the middle of the night and scaring the crap out of all of the wives and kids who are sound asleep. What better way to ingratiate yourself with the community? An improvised die grinder and a little iron battering ram are the weapons of choice. Funnier still is that they appear to catch (or at least detain) the same middle-aged Saddam-Hussein-looking guy multiple times. Dude--how many houses is this guy staying in? He gets around. One wonders if these guys are all grooming themselves to look exactly like Saddam as some sort of twisted practical joke on the hapless American foot soldier?

Can our eight heroes bring order to the chaos that is the "truck stop" Al Fallujah? Nope--Not a chance. By logical extension can 100,000 of us do the same for the 22 million other Iraqis. Again...that's a big negative.

It looks like a bad episode of cops, except we really get to meet, understand and care about each one of the soldiers in the film. They are all very human, very real, and honest to a fault .

By law (apparently), all Iraqi males get to keep guns in the house (one gun per guy)--so many of these nocturnal home invasions are followed by a spirited game of "match the rifle to the Saddam look-alike". One can almost sense the tension building each day in the streets of Fallujah, culminating in the filmmakers catching an actual IED attack and explosion on film. No one gets killed, but the driver of the lead Humvee sustains a pretty good concussion from the blast.

It would be oversimplifying to write off Dreamland as anti-war propaganda--our guys are clearly the good guys--they just don't want to get blown up. And they're stuck doing a job (policeman) that they clearly didn't think they were signing up for.

If you had in your head the notion that we can ever "win" the war in Iraq--this film should pretty much help put those ideas out to pasture--for good.