A director may satisfactorily do all that he sets out to, come up with an impeccable work, yet not make a good movie. Of course, judgement depends on what one seeks in going to the movie-house in the first place. While one can admire a work even if the characters are despicable, the subject unpleasant or the viewpoint contrary, in the end opinion must consider the film as film.

Co-directors, -producers and -editors Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein’s Gunner Palace, on which he is also photographer and sound editor, achieves its purpose of presenting an account verité in “the soldiers’ story not see[n] on the news, . . . a mosaic of personalities and perspectives.” That is, it projects the gut realities of forgotten combatants in Iraq, shortly after President Bush’s declaration that “major combat operations” were finished. Over two separated periods totaling two months, these members of the 2nd Batallion/3rd Field Artillery aka “Gunners” talk openly of their lives and hopes as they relax, joke, party, patrol, raid and detain, distribute help or propaganda, and are abused, cursed out, sniped at, and killed.

Mostly fresh out of map-of-America small-town high schools, their speech laced with street and combat obscenity, they know that nightly national news has passed them by for a bored audience whose attention has wandered to reality shows and reruns.

The filmmakers give us in essence a sequence of unposed snapshots -- spontaneous interviews, individuals unwinding as best they can, groups on armored patrol -- intimate and connected, not thematically but by a chronology underlined through subtitled dates and numbers of days of duty tour remaining for each. The awareness, and the fear, of death is subdued but present, though onscreen violence is for the most part mental and directed against Iraqis; end-titles indicate that, three weeks after Tucker’s departure for the security of family and home, the first 2/3 soldier died from a roadside bomb and that others were killed, as well, including an NCO shown at a party in the film.

The title refers to Baghdad’s surreal macabre royal Azima Palace-cum-pleasure spa once belonging to Uday Hussein. Partly destroyed but still boasting a putting green, swimming pool, lofty ceilings and arches, and an ersatz Playboy office-bedroom, the building has been requisitioned as barracks and hence nicknamed “Gunner Palace” after the four-hundred quartered troops.

On the cover and inside Time’s December 29, 2003-January 5, 2004 issue, representing our boys in “the fight for peace” as collective Person of the Year, these volunteers are proud of serving but mostly avoid talk of politics or right and wrong. Playing a Hendrix-inspired ”Star Spangled Banner” on electric guitar, rhyming rap or written poetry, or teaching a native interpreter American techniques for picking up women, they are aware that this is no longer headline news, that not even pals back home can understand, and that what might be broadcast as “reconstruction” by those without soldier-sons has never ceased being dangerous offensive operation.

Innocent in so many ways despite the experience, understandably American in off-duty dress, fast-food palates and general tastes, their Arabic rudimentary and their implied opinion of the native population not high, these men and a couple of women constitute an oasis abroad. An interpreter once kiddingly called “Mike” Tyson is arrested and flexi-cuffed for fingering them as targets, a privileged sheikh is detained but soon back in good graces, householders with large stashes of cash or rocket launchers claim to be guiltless businessmen, journalists, friends, anything, neither side trusts the other, and so, amidst fears, there is isolation and the drive to survive, go home, never come back.

There are moments of real humor, and of humanity, but what emerges is a poignant bewildered sense of being lost. As is natural, film quality is grainy, shots jumpy and imperfectly lit. The filmmakers seldom comment, and do so with ironic newscast voiceovers and Apocalypse Now Wagnerian music, and it is the soldiers themselves who most often see their situation in terms of America’s most pervasive export, cinema: “We live in this movie.”

The husband-and-wife co-directors avoid preconception or tidying up. However neatly diagrammed, football’s nitty-gritty line play is chaotic, and success usually fortuitous.  Despite maps, how much more is war hopelessly confused.

That confusion emerges, along with individual soldiers’ personalities. This is the achievement, and while that motive is worthy, the feeling is that chaos of events mirrored by chaos of technique does not make for a film. 

(Released by Palm Pictures and rated "PG-13" on appeal for strong language throughout, violent situations and some drug references.)