Generation Kill

Generation Kill is rewarding in its complexity. It feels real - and that realness is bracing, sad and funny in equal measures.

What Kill has to offer is clarity and clear-eyed empathy. TV's the better for it.

Wright says. "After the Vietnam War ended, the onus of shame largely fell on the veterans. This time around, if shame is to be had when the Iraq conflict ends--and all indications are there will be plenty of it--the veterans are the last people in America to deserve it." Generation Kill makes that point so powerfully as to stand among the truest and most trenchant war movies of all time.

Kill pays both you and its subjects two solid compliments: It doesn't scream ''Take heed: This is a work of art!'' And it lets you form your own opinions about what its social commentary is.

Critical without being overtly political, with stretches of boredom punctuated by the sudden chaos of firefights where it’s impossible to distinguish innocent bystanders from insurgents, Generation Kill is both timely and timeless.

It’s as addictive and absorbing, in its own way, as “The Wire.”

HBO's Generation Kill is remarkable.

Bolstered by superb acting and first-rate direction and cinematography, Kill delivers the goods in ways both unexpected and rewarding.

Colbert is the series' rock, and a straightman contrast to the constantly yammering Person, his driver. As the stoic enigma and the hopped-up smart-ass speed through the desert landscape, you could almost take Kill for a surreal road comedy.

Once again Simon and his producing partner, Ed Burns, plunge us deeply into the culture of foul-mouthed men, many of them barely out of their teens, who have ready access to firearms and agendas that have little to do with the American dream that you and I understood growing up. And, as before, you can’t stop watching it.

Meanwhile, some remarkable television has been made. To report on a new generation of young warriors raised on hip-hop, heavy metal, and video games, Wright went to Iraq as Michael Herr before him had gone to Vietnam, like Dante to hell with a cassette recording of Jimi Hendrix.

This technically superior project intriguingly mirrors territory the producers explored in tackling Baltimore's mean streets, and while Baghdad's avenues are even meaner, the producers' impeccable craftsmanship is roughly the same.

There’s a formal integrity to the Simon-and-Burns storytelling style--predicated on the theory that details matter, complexity rules and you can’t force momentum--that meshes well with the close-up vividness of Wright’s dispatches from an often chaotic front.

Wright is a diligent reporter, and his material has been whipped into a smooth script under producers David Simon and Ed Burns.

Generation Kill, which has a superb cast and script, provides a searingly intense, clear-eyed look at the first stage of the war, and it is often gripping. But like a beautiful woman who swathes herself in concealing clothes and distracting hats, the series fights its own intrinsic allure.

It's best to get quickly past the confused and shapeless first episode and on to the rest, where the characters become individualized.

A raucous, raunchy and utterly loving account of life at the bottom of the military food chain.

There is a near-perfect symmetry between the sensibility of Wright's book and the work of Simon and Burns.

An engrossing, detailed military character drama, Generation Kill is a modern-day "Band of Brothers," a warts-and-all account that hits closer to home because it depicts such recent events.

Like Wright’s book, the series is disjointed and disturbing, a story of youthful workers who are underprepared, underequipped, and underinformed.

Generation Kill tends to play as a series of discrete events. I suppose an argument might be made that this mirrors the way that the constant threat of extinction, and subject always to a sudden change in (rarely explained) orders, makes one live in the moment. I don't think that was what the producers intended, but it works well enough for watching it.

If the world that Simon, Burns, Wright and company drop us into can be confusing at first (mirroring, as they intended, the confusion that Wright felt at the time), it's a fully-realized one that's both thousands of miles away (literally and figuratively) from the Baltimore of "The Wire" and one that will feel very familiar to anyone who spent a lot of time watching McNulty and Bunk drink at the train tracks.

You get the sense that the filmmakers' vision and Wright's are never quite in sync--or perhaps are in sync too perfectly.

It plays like it's been built for antisocial boys--mchair heroes in love with guns and in search of demented adventure.

If we got to know any of the characters in Generation Kill, the show might be more interesting, or, at least, more memorable.