Critics reviews

What starts as harrowing and heartbreaking becomes more or less desensitizing. Which is the trajectory of a soldier’s experience... So while Lagoze’s film may not offer any genuinely new insights, it is an unsettling opportunity to bear witness to the numbing chaos of war.

This remarkable film comes across as war’s backstage story—it’s about the stuff they leave out of the official coverage... What Lagoze and editor Eric Schuman don’t excise is the stuff that’s ostensibly not for public consumption: Combat Obscura is an unexpurgated “Making Of” of the Afghan campaign.

Leaning in to the style its patchwork of source material requires, “Combat Obscura,” is an eye-opening dispatch from a conflict mired in confusion.

If you like your war images raw, unfiltered and as anxious and haphazard as battle itself, then the brief documentary “Combat Obscura” may be for you... Still, due to the movie’s deliberate lack of narrative arc, thematic stance and clear characterizations... we’re never always sure what we’re watching — or why.

A viewer’s response here will have much to do with her feelings about America’s endless wars... More polished docs like Restrepo have covered similar ground in less scattered fashion, usually giving more coherent pictures of military operations while they’re at it.

For a while, [Lagoze's] approach is productively amorphous... Eventually, though, [his] relentless horror show becomes rather numbing... [Combat Obscura] may not offer much more than a hellish, on-the-ground vision of the war in Afghanistan, but perhaps it’s enough that Lagoze detonates any lingering illusions of military heroism.

Most of us have read enough horrifying news accounts and seen enough fictionalized accounts of soldiers in combat to feel a bit numb to a film as raw as this... but Combat Obscura does become genuinely upsetting in its final passages, paying equal attention to the atrocities of our country and the wounds a generation of Americans will have to live with for decades to come.

Combat Obscura can be viewed as an hourlong “outtakes” for the commercials full of heroic Marines you see during football games. But that descriptor implies mistakes, whereas what we see of these young men is how they act when their guard is down and they don’t have to perform nobility for anyone else.