First-person shooter.

• Author: Watkins, Tate
• Position: Briefly Noted - Armadillo - Movie review - Brief article

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

For six months documentarian Janus Metz embedded with Danish troops at a forward operating base in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, to shoot the 2010 documentary Armadillo. Most of his subjects are barely old enough to shave but just the right age to have grown up playing first-person-shooter video games, which they do to kill time when not trampling villagers' crops while on patrol outside the base.

Metz's cameras seem to pervade every second of the soldiers' lives, whether they're watching porn during downtime, killing five Taliban in a wooded ravine at the film's climax, or boasting...