taxi to the dark side

It could be said that Michael Moore has done a lot for the documentary. He's certainly not objective, but he has made it a more accessible genre. Still, his style of filmmaking is definitely not the norm.

That's why it's nice to see documentaries like Taxi To the Dark Side still making waves. Writer and director Alex Gibney's film is a by-the-books documentary with interviews, narration and archived film and photos. It is quiet and unexciting, but it does what it is supposed to do-tell a story.

Taxi to the Dark Side, which recently won the Oscar for Best Documentary, is a straightforward analysis of the United States' relationship with torture in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.

The documentary does a fine job of tackling this salient issue. Each interview is carefully selected and insightful as to the nature of torture. He treats torture not just as something only done by a handful of rogue soldiers, but as a careful result of Capitol Hill and White House policy-making.

To say Gibney is completely unbiased would be false. Gibney fills the film with images and film clips of Bush-administration anti-terrorist patriotism speeches. However, by the nature of the film, there is little room for totally objective filmmaking. Gibney responsibly makes this film not an attack on the Bush administration but instead an analysis of the uses of torture by the United States. It is shocking and gruesome, but not sensationalist. The point of Taxi to the Dark Side is not to elicit chuckles at the idiocy of our government, but to present the plain truth of what is going on in the prisons of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. All of that said, it is hard to imagine any merit to the U.S.'s argument in ambiguously-stated support of these goings-on.

Taxi to the Dark Side is full of unsavory images from Abu Ghraib. It is an example of detailed and responsible reporting and synthesis of information. It may not be as exciting as what's playing at the megaplex, but it is a relevant and important study of what the government is actually doing. The stories, the pictures and the individual people are all of great significance, but their sum effect in the context of this film is the truly worthwhile part. It is an important, revelatory documentary that exposes an important story much deeper than the headlines of The New York Times.