Kajaki

If we’ve learned anything since the beginning of the 21st Century, it’s that overthrowing an authoritarian regime is easy.  I mean piss easy. You send in some special forces to hook up with local rebels, call in some air strikes and the regime is gone in a matter of weeks.  In a bigger country like Iraq, you might need a few cruise missiles and some mechanised battalions, but you’ll still be in control of the country sooner rather than later.

The bit that comes after; turning a country that shouldn’t really exist, is just a mish mash of tribes who have been fighting each other for centuries, into Switzerland, is the hard part. I mean really fucking hard.

I’m as hawkish as anyone – more hawkish than most, I’d say – but every British military intervention of this century has failed.  At least the Americans stuck around in Iraq long enough to get some sort of withdrawal with honour.

Afghanistan was always seen as “the good war” (because removing a genocidal dictator in Iraq was “bad”), but the British deployment to Helmand, beginning in 2006, was a complete and utter failure.

Anyway, you’re not here for my political views, you’re here for a review of a film.

Kajaki has had an interesting production; it was crowdfunded, and then last week the producers got various male celebrities to tweet telling their followers to go and see it.  Oddly, one of the celebrities was Piers Morgan, a man who happened to buy shares in a company just before before the financial column in the newspaper he edited said they would do well, and who lost his job when he printed photos showing British soldiers torturing Iraqi detainees which turned out to be fake (he remains unrepentant about this).  A strange choice of person to promote a film about the British Army.  It’s only being shown at Vue cinemas, which I would think limits their audience somewhat, but it was nice to see staff in olive green when I turned up to watch the film.

I almost put some money into the crowdfunding campaign for Kajaki, but didn’t because at the time I had very little money, the rewards you got for giving money were a bit crap, and some of the money would go to charities like Help For Heroes.  I’m not as bad as one of my friends, who once told me he wanted to set up a rival charity to Help For Heroes called “Help For Cunts Who Couldn’t Get A Proper Job”, but this whole “support our troops” thing that seems to be an import from the US, and only happens when you’re fighting a shitty, unwinnable war (see: Vietnam), never sits well with me.  The armed forces are not automatically heroes. The civilian version of this is those who venerate nurses and teachers as saints, when the truth is that some are awful, some are great, and most are just doing their job the best they can, like the rest of us.

I said this was a film review, right?

Kajaki is a place in Helmand, the site of a reservoir and hydro electric dam.  The film is a the true story of a British patrol who get caught in a minefield, the hangover from the Russian invasion of the country.

There are things I liked about Kajaki, and things I didn’t like.  I’m not sure they needed to tell us, via an onscreen title, that Helmand Province is in Afghanistan.  Is anyone who watches the film not going to know that?  There is a bit of dodgy exposition at the start, and the dialogue as a whole is a bit ropey.  The CGI isn’t great, and it’s obvious a lot of dialogue was dubbed in post production.  Coupled with some sub par acting, this made me I fail to sympathise with the protagonists when it all kicked off.

Not that it does kick off, really.  The soldiers aren’t fighting an enemy; when they enter the minefield, and the inevitable happens (more than once) they aren’t taking out Taliban, they’re just unlucky to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  With this, the film ducks the rights and wrongs of the deployment to Helmand.  It’s been described as “the British Hurt Locker”, but a closer comparison is Lone Survivor; a small band of soldiers is up against it in Afghanistan.  Lone Survivor is far, far superior, though.

There is some gallows humour, and some very British jokes (a guessing game they play means a character asks “Am I Fred West?”).  Whoever did the make up for the wounds deserves an award, but though the subtitle is “The True Story”, it doesn’t tell the truth.  You cannot have a film about Western intervention in Afghanistan where the Taliban only make an appearance at long range, at night.  The film doesn’t even tell the truth about Kajaki; two years after the events depicted in the film, an operation took place to install a new turbine in the hydro electric plant in the dam.  It would create jobs, and provide electricity.  The plan failed.

Like the British deployment to Helmand, Kajaki has high ambitions, but was done on the cheap, and is ultimately disappointing.