No End In Sight (2007)

Written, Produced & Directed by Charles Ferguson

Look no further, if there is such thing as a sure bet, it's that No End In Sight will win the Academy Award for Best Documentary. It may very well be the best documentary created this year, but I feel it will receive the award for all the wrong reasons. So let me begin this by saying, see this movie, if you care at all about the world around you, you are adverse to the government's actions in Iraq, or you are interested in the documentary form at all. If you are a Michael Moore fan, view this film, as it shows how a documentary should be created. Not to speak unfavorably of Michael Moore, his Bowling for Columbine is still easily one of my favorite films ever, if only for its defiance of documentary typicality that resulted in such an entertaining and heart wrenching film.

This film centers on the United States Government's handling of the War on Iraq, and since it no longer has a central government, a real military, or a police force of any kind, has become a war on civilians, a war of religion and a war to control the oil industry. The documentarian at hand, Charles Ferguson, is not a documentarian at all, he is a scholar that felt the only way to explore the subject and present it to a mainstream audience was to make a documentary. Sadly, he was right, but the pre-determination of most Americans to shut out political and more specifically, new age war themed movies has limited his target audience. I suspect with an Oscar nomination, and most likely an eventual win, its popularity will grow on video, even the video release alone will expand its audience greatly, but the problem is, anyone that wants to know this information already knows most of it, anyone that doesn't will continue to ignore it, as they have for the past 5 years.

Ferguson interviews many important people from within the Post-War Reconstruction industry, most of whom either held government positions in Washington, or who have been in Iraq, rebuilding the country from the ground up. Each of them has become disenchanted with the way this war has been handled from the beginning, in the planning stages, into the mess it has become to this very day. He interviews ORHA reconstruction workers, Marines, wounded veterans, advisors and insiders that have been on the inside of the strategic and combat sides of this war.

Many of these people speak about how the simple and probable solutions sat right in front of them, and when they presented these ideas to their higher ups, they were either simply ignored, or told firmly to keep quiet. The politics of this film aren't liberal or conservative, although I can already hear the neo-cons crying "Foul!". This will be merely because they can't spin the facts presented in any logical way, and you can see the anguish and despair on Walter Slocombe's face as he solemnly answers "No." and "I don't believe that" to hard hitting questions, ones that raise the point of whether many positions taken by the US Government were intelligent or ethical. You can see that he feels he is being picked on, but that is because the position he has been in is so wrong and has for so long been controlled by other people, that he is merely sadly defeated.

This, like King of Kong, is an example of great subjective filmmaking. There are no supported or proposed politics to the film itself. The people being interviewed have theirs, but those are rarely explored in favor of facts, and event by event recollections from important moments in this war. Donald Rumsfeld is painted to be an ass, not because of editing manipulation (as will be accused, I'm sure), but because what he says is so offensive and ridiculous. He whole heartedly laughs and mocks reports of looting and chaos after the fall of Baghdad, saying "These people act like 'Ahh! Ahh! The sky is falling.' Riots are typical in this situation, it's something to be expected. But it is not that bad, these are nay sayers to our cause." These words are played against the actual images, from the same days, of looting and rioting in Iraq. Afterwards, the images are taken of many of the most important cultural and economic structures in Iraq, all of them devastated, burned, looted. How is this something to be mocked, like it wasn't actually happening?

These moments punctuate the ideas and concerns expressed within the film, from the mishandling of the Iraqi military, to the collapse of the economy and job markets, and the events that caused them, the failures in communication, and the pure ignorance that formed the events that ended with these catastrophic results.

The film itself is a technical marvel, it makes a compelling and intelligent argument for its case, and much like King of Kong, it refuses to take either side, it remains steadfastly center, but at the same time brings the opinion heavily out of you. If you are a viewer that agrees with the tactics or decisions of the Bush Administration, you will agree that these obviously wrong decisions were the best ones to be made at the time (In addition you will prove your stupidity).

While the film has an obvious off camera voice (Ferguson, I suppose), it has no central persuasive figure, as a Michael Moore movie does. He has subverted and changed the non-fiction format to include himself, and his ideas. I tend to enjoy that, but I'm one of few people that can see the merit and drawbacks of this approach, and still rate his films as non-fictions pieces. Of course the argument is made that he subverts and changes the events captured through editing and voice over, which I don't deny, I merely realize what is opinion, and what is fact. Here, due to the absence of such a plot device (which is all Moore really is) the viewer merely absorbs the information, and makes their own decision. As I said before, this is the purest form of documentary, and although that point will be argued by many, it is the truth. Editing is a tool of filmmaking, and to create a truly objective film, one would have to view every moment of existence of their subject, which would not be enjoyable, or even possible, since you cannot film and present every single moment of anything, let alone a war. So, in fact, Ferguson has created the truest documentary.

For all of these reasons, he will most certainly win the Academy Award for Best Documentary. I don't disagree that it's not the best documentary, it may very well be, that's a subjective point. The problem is, due to the liberal bias in the Academy of Motion Pictures and Science's (AMPAS) membership, this film will be awarded the Oscar merely for its subject matter, and that the people viewing it agree with the subject being taken on. King of Kong is just as objective and pure documentary as this film is, but I feel it has no chance at all of even being seriously considered for the award because of its subject matter. Sure, video games have no bearing on the lives of humans, but does that make it any less of a great documentary? I don't think so, but as you will see in March, the Academy certainly does.

With that said, Ferguson has created a fine piece of work, a true thinking man's thesis on the lingering war on Iraq, and the consequences of the actions that have been taken. There really is no other film like it in the genre, outside of Errol Morris' film "The Fog of War", but even then the two aren't relatable, since Morris' film is about a single man, and his role in many various wars. Watch this film if it at all interests you, I'm not of the belief that if you have no interest in it, you are doing yourself a disservice. If you have no interest in PS I Love You, you certainly shouldn't see that, because both of these films wear their plots on their sleeves. However, if you are a concerned American, or a documentary enthusiast, this is definitely the film that you should be watching.

9.4/10