The title Full Battle Rattle is apparently army slang for wearing full body armor, approximately 50 pounds of it. As for the movie, it's a fascinating documentary of the army's full scale battle simulation area set up in the Mojave Desert.
In an area of approximately 1000 square miles, the army has spent a billion dollars on their giant simulator. It features hundreds of extras playing Iraqi citizens, who are frequently real Iraqi immigrants. Insurgents are played by American soldiers who have already done tours of duty in Iraq. Army units heading to Iraq spend three weeks here, preparing for what they will encounter when they get to the real battle.
What makes the documentary fascinating is that the scenario is both real and fake. They have gone to great length to get as many elements from the real Iraq into the simulator, but in the end it is just that, a simulation. It is carefully designed and scripted. Various scenarios present themselves, providing a compacted version of what might actually happen.
The best part of the movie is watching the American commander trying to learn how to deal with a foreign population on the fly. It's a somewhat humbling experience. His intentions are good and some of his ideas are solid but the situation still spins out of his control as small things grow into big problems and a lack of knowledge of the local culture hamstrings his efforts. It makes it clear the folly of ever thinking that occupying another nation is easy, no matter how disparate the levels of wealth and technology.
The documentary doesn't limit itself to just the training ground. It follows these people home afterwards to see how it affects them. There is a nice subplot about an Iraqi man who escaped his country and over the course of a year managed to make his way to America, where he landed a job as an actor portraying an Iraqi police officer at the training ground. We get to watch as he navigates the insane bureaucratic American immigration system, trying to get political asylum and stay here. It's more than a little bizarre to think that a man could risk his life to travel around the globe to get here, provide a tangible service to the American military and still be in considerable danger of being deported. How exactly do we keep forgetting that this is a nation of immigrants? Guys like this should be admired and appreciated, rather than treated like pests to be eliminated.
It's inevitable that people are going to project politics on this film (as I just did in the previous paragraph about immigration), but if you pay attention it's clear that they aren't at play here. The soldiers' mental state is on the job at hand. They pay no attention to the broader picture because it is in the details that they live and die. How to handle locals and how to fight when needed are their priorities. It is very clear that clear communication is vital in war. More than once a scenario develops and then gets a lot worse because communication was either muddled or broken. You could easily spin that idea in one direction or another to support your view of the war, but it should be remembered that to these soldiers, it's their life we're talking about, not somebody's political aspirations.
The movie can be both grim and funny. Watching the commander crushed at his failings is a sad moment. Watching the soldiers who get to play insurgents having a grand old time wreaking chaos is funny. And sometimes a scene does both at once and instructs a bit on how military/government activities can be a bit problematic. There is a moment where the army is trying to placate "locals" who are infuriated that some people were accidently killed by the troops at a checkpoint. One soldier is using the battalion's cash to buy a little good will with these people. Unfortunately he doesn't really understand the exchange rate and is horrified when they figure out he handed out about $50,000 in a matter of minutes.
The best documentaries tell us a good story, inform us about the world and connect emotionally, all at the same time. You can credit Full Battle Rattle with high marks on each of those.
