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Standard Operating Procedure

Movie details

Famous documentary filmmaker and Oscar-winner Errol Morris (The Fog of War, 2003) investigates the scandals surrounding human rights violations at the Abu Ghraib prison complex near Baghdad and investigates what's behind the so-called "anti-terror war".

Director Errol Morris

Stars Christopher Bradley, Sarah Denning, Joshua Feinman, Jeff L. Green, Merry Grissom

Strong themes, Graphic images of prisoner abuse

Our review

The new film from acclaimed documentary filmmaker Errol Morris is as much a treatise on the nature of photography and representing reality as it is an expose into the controversial prisoner abuse photos of Abu Ghraib.

It's difficult to forget the shocking pictures that emerged from the Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib. We were all astounded to see the diminutive 20-year-old Private Lynndie England in combat gear, with a leash attached to the neck of a naked prisoner who was writhing, humiliated, on the floor of the prison. And the horrifying pictures of the "human pyramid" were disturbingly reminiscent of genocide from wars gone by.

But as is always the case with every photo, there's inevitably more to the story than meets the eye. And in "Standard Operating Procedure" we quickly begin to question the US government's line that the abuse was a result of "a few bad apples", and instead learn that much of what we saw was systematic and "standard operating procedures" imported from other interrogation prisons like Guantanamo Bay.

A master of documentary filmmaking, Morris again employs his signature approach, in which he deftly weaves together interviews with recreated footage to evoke the feeling and atmosphere of the stories told. In addition he's been given extraordinary access to the 270 photographs that were given to the US Army Criminal Investigation Command, who were in charge of investigating the abuse allegations.

In hindsight, it's easy to cast judgement on the soldiers. After all, they appear to relish in both the frat house-style humiliation inflicted on the prisoners, as well as the more insidious terrorising, such as making a prisoner stand on a box for hours on end with the threat of electrocution should he fall. But the film quickly sympathises with these lower-rank soldiers who lived in a culture that stressed falling into line, particularly when you're in the middle of a warzone.

The most frightening aspect of the film is the finger-pointing made by the interviewees at abuses that existed outside of frame. That is, the prisoner abuses, even murder, that weren't recorded on film or on paper, and weren't the subject of investigation. We're left with an uneasy feeling that the US government ran their operation with a "do whatever it takes" mentality and desperately covered-up anything that would be perceived as abuse, rather than be morally upstanding and transparent in their operations.

8/10

Monica Tan