5 DAYS OF WAR IS JUST TOO LONG
Beginning with a quote from Hiram Johnson that truth is the first casualty of any war and a frame revealing that 500 war correspondents have died during the last decade, 5 Days of War reports on the five-day war in Georgia during mid-2008, which received little attention as the world focused on the Beijing Olympics and the American presidential election campaign. But the fact is that Russian military forces, including tanks, occupied Ossetian territory beyond the line of “peacekeepers” inside Georgia until European heads of state flew to the capital Tbilisi to urge an end to the war—and the Russians have remained ever since. Georgians fled their advance and today still remain in refugee camps. At the end of the film, some of them hold pictures of their loved ones who lost their lives. The focus of 5 Days of War, however, is on journalists who risked their lives to get the word out. The film implies that their efforts served to stop the war. Directed by Renny Harlin, the film is 1:53 hours, filled with redundant battle scenes and little intelligible dialog, shows that Georgian decisionmaking was less than democratic, and ends with explanatory titles that put the conflict in perspective. Filmviewers will note that the main Russian war crime is to kill innocent civilians, but Georgian war crimes are not identified. More balanced coverage of war crimes, though still condemning the Russians more than the Georgians, is in a chapter of America’s War Crimes Quagmire (2010), as the template for war crimes appears to be what Americans got away with in Iraq. Nevertheless, the Political Film Society was set up to reward filmmakers who bring important political messages to the screen, and 5 Days of War definitely does so, however maladroitly. Accordingly, the film has been nominated for best film exposé of 2011, best film on human rights, and best film on the virtues of resolving conflicts peacefully. MH