The one thing that strikes you more than anything else about the war documentary is how quiet it is. You would expect bombs exploding and bullets whizzing and shouts and screams, but they are all missing from this work by Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker.What remains is a constant recognition of the tension under which these soldiers are operating. Every moment, 24 hours a day, they are under threat. Everey step they take, every road they travel is fraught with danger from IEDs or motors or rifle fire.They are America's young; people who, for the most part, had no other options back home, and are now joined in a brotherhood that plays together, prays together, and dies together.It is a beautiful story of what our soldiers are going through.

When I say that Gunner Palace should have been more, I don't mean that it should have been a better or more in-depth look at the lives of the troops in Iraq. Indeed, it is one of the closest looks at the daily lives of the soldiers over there that we have been able to see since the war started, but Director Michael Tucker has no idea how to get good interviews from the soldiers, and he messes it up even worse when he decides to talk. It's really sad that so many of the soldiers were handed this incredible opportunity to give a first account depiction of what their experience is like in Iraq and they use it to just screw around and act like idiots. Granted, a lot of these kids are barely out of high school, but I wish Tucker would have concentrated on the ones that had something important to say. I have all the respect in the world for these guys, but when it comes to getting an idea of what it's like to live in Iraq in a time of war, I'd be happy to stick to the guys that want to really talk about what's important, I could do without the interviews of the guys that just want to be funny.The guys that just want to be funny, of course, do not include the musicians featured in this documentary. Most of them are not making the kind of music that I am interested in but it is good to see that so many of them take their difficult experiences and channel it into something productive.The biggest problem that I had with this movie, however, is the goofy, melodramatic voice-over that Tucker put in every once in a while. Yes, it is some pretty dramatic subject matter, but the way that Tucker narrates this documentary reminds me at times of the way John Bunnell hosts World's Wildest Police Videos. He over-dramatizes everything in a way that just makes it sound goofy (I once saw an episode where a car running from the police went briefly onto the shoulder on a country road and knocked down a couple of pieces of rotted wood that were sticking up through the dry grass, and Bunnell chimes in, "the fleeing madman SMASHES through a wooden barricade!!!").Tucker doesn't fill his documentary with unnecessary hyperbole like Bunnell does, but rather with a misplaced theatrical performance as the narrator. Where simple descriptions would have been sufficient, Tucker opts for an added performance that just makes him hard to listen to. When it comes to a direct look at the lives of the troops in Iraq, I just don't think anything extra is necessary, but it seems that he concentrates more on this than on the really relevant things that are going on. There are some soldiers who do give important insight, but so much time is wasted and so much extra fluff is put in that it makes a lot of the documentary look like farce.

I ended up liking this quite a bit, although paradoxically the movie's greatest strength (an unwillingness to get wrapped up in the political arguments pro/con on the Iraq war, a willingness more or less to keep the vision down to the grunt's level) is also the movie's big weakness, as it often seems one or two steps removed from raw footage (in fact there's two false endings here, until finally the movie makers concede that they don't know how to end the thing....and then end it). The movie makers start the film suggesting this stuff should be on television and I agree; this really should be a very special "Primetime Live" or something.That said, the footage is superb, the sense of a grunt's life very well evoked, with individual personalities nicely delineated. For what it is, essentially journalism in documentary film fancy-dress, it's very well done. The movie makers took some real risk; one only wishes more journalists would do the same. I also liked the melange of hip-hop, Islam, metal guitar, doper humor, Army briskness, pop culture references and the like that the film portrays: I have a pet theory that the twenty-first century will be characterized by the multi-cultural stew that GUNNER PALACE and the like portray. Worth checking out.

This movie through all its cursing, violence and drug references, this movie takes the "BS" out of the media's broadcasts and throws you straight into what little sense of "reality" one can get of war on the big screen. It leaves the politics behind and puts you straight in the middle of The Sandbox with the men and women who fight for this country. This movie will probably have you laughing your tail end off then in a somber silence in a matter of seconds. Political bias aside, Gunner Palace is something every citizen of the world needs to see, preferably before the next special report on what's "happening" in Iraq.All this said, I personally walked away with a greater sense of pride in my country's soldiers, in the eyes of everyone of the speakers in this movie I saw those of my friends who have been there or who are there. This movie has moved me in a way which I shall not soon forget. The look of sheer terror and hope all on the same face has a profound effect on one's soul.