Forget The Hurt Locker. Forget The Thin Red Line, Saving Private Ryan or any other war movie focusing on the dramas of combat soldiers. Maintaining a high aesthetic standard throughout, Janus Metz’s Armadillo proposes a new kind of discourse: more emotional, frightening and powerful than anything done before.

Hearing “war” and “movie” in the same sentence probably makes you assume that we’re dealing with loads of special effects. Well, in Armadillo, the bullets are not blanks, the film’s crew is not safe, and the dead are actually gone forever. The only effect you might consider is how real reality feels and, at the same time, how artistically it can be portrayed.

Smartly combining documentary storytelling with the visual style of fiction, the movie analyzes the personality changes occurring within a group of young Danish soldiers, volunteering for a 6-month training in Camp Armadillo, Afghanistan. Although the mission doesn’t initially seem that challenging - except for the war-zone placement, as the frustration of not being able to handle the Taliban harassment accumulates we slowly see the group evolving from normal teenagers into cruel, cynical soldiers. Even after being injured or feeling death passing by just seconds away, they still willingly return to the camp as if it would be impossible for them to imagine an existence without the adrenaline rush brought by dangerous conflicts.

From a tribute to these volunteers and the sacrifices they make, the movie could have easily turned into a piece making the audience despise everything about war and soldiers. The filmmaking techniques manage however to place the spectators in an observatory position rather than a judgmental one. Impressive editing gives a feeling that there’s a camera for each character, when in fact there’s only one and no way of repeating the same action twice. The beautiful steady shots, filmed while the DOP was in the range of fire, are another of the film’s distinguishing marks.

Even the viewing experience was not just about the movie, but also about the people I was sharing it with. The connection in the cinema was unbelievable to the point where it felt like everybody was breathing in tune. There’s thus not a single level on which Armadillo fails to deliver as a cinematographic event, making me feel that this is what film-watching should be all about.

By Maria Diceanu