Documentary
The Hornet s Nest, an assembly by directors David Salzberg and Christian Tureaud of video shot by Mike and Carlos Boettcher, shows us soldiers under fire and losing comrades. The father-and-son war correspondents were embedded with U.S Army and Marine elements in Afghanistan in 2011. You watch shaky helmet-cam footage and hear bullets whistling by. While the material captured is extraordinary, it s too often presented in prosaic reality-TV style: A generic suspense-film score makes already tense scenes as when soldiers try to determine whether an assembly of pipes and wires is simply a jury-rigged source of electricity for a rural home or an improvised explosive device feel less grave than they really are. It s a disservice to the Boettchers remarkable reporting.