Puts a bitterly ironic spin on the Army's best-known recruiting slogan, "Be all that you can be."
Army of One
✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Canada, United States · 2005
1h 9m
Director Sarah Goodman
Starring Sara Miller, Thaddeus Ressler, Nelson Reyes
Genre Documentary
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Nineteen-year-old Nelson is a Puerto Rican high school dropout from the South Bronx looking for a ticket out of the ghetto. Thaddeus, 22, gives up a cushy stockbroker job to pursue fantasies of killing Osama Bin Laden. Sara, 22, a dancer from North Carolina fails to make it in New York and leaves her best girlfriend to return home. Swept up in the patriotic fervour that followed 9/11, these young Americans dream of fighting for their country, of being the heroes that star in the slick ad campaigns broadcast by the military. Canadian director Sarah Goodman, living in New York at the time, saw long line-ups at recruitment centres as the country prepared for war. Gaining incredible access to the US army bases, Goodman follows the three new recruits for the next two years, starting with the harshness of basic training. Army of One is a heartbreaking film that exposes what happens to each of them as their dreams of heroism clash with the realities of army life.
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What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt
Concise, humane documentary.
Riveting and timely.
Village Voice by Laura Sinagra
If you can handle the truth, Sarah Goodman's entropic doc is as exquisite a basic training in banal U.S. Army culture as you're likely to find.
By the end, even Goodman seems to have lost interest.
Goodman doesn't preach or point fingers. She lets the three recruits have their say, and allows viewers to make up their own minds on the issues her film raises.
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