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Critics Consensus: Camp X-Ray's treatment of its subject verges on the shallow, but benefits greatly from a pair of impressive performances from Kristen Stewart and Peyman Moaadi.
Critic Consensus: Camp X-Ray's treatment of its subject verges on the shallow, but benefits greatly from a pair of impressive performances from Kristen Stewart and Peyman Moaadi.
All Critics (59) | Top Critics (20) | Fresh (44) | Rotten (15)
Camp X-Ray raises quite a few fascinating questions about power, sexism, and war, yet fails to explore them in any real depth. More troubling still, it's a character study that does little in the way of character development.
It's invigorated, somewhat, by strong central performances from actors on opposite sides of a locked steel door.
Writer-director Peter Sattler... grounds his story in the cold operational detail of Gitmo, showing how the soldiers there administer the legal limbo of indefinite detention and insulate themselves from the cruelty and injustice of what they're doing.
On another movie, the high-corn finale might have worked; here, it just feels patently false.
Has a great idea behind it - a young female soldier assigned guard duty at Guantanamo Bay forms a kinship with one of the incarcerated Muslims - but first-time writer-director Peter Sattler doesn't go anywhere interesting with that notion.
It helps if you think of "Camp X-Ray" and the prison face-off between Stewart and Maadi as a cautionary conversation unfolding more like a theater production than a movie.
The final 15 minutes betray the first 100, hammering all themes into our skulls. It's an unnecessarily on-the-nose finish to a mostly organic central relationship.
The baggage Stewart brings to 'Camp X-Ray' makes its first hour more compelling than anything in the screenplay.
This is an excellent movie. It is a powerful drama set at the Guantanamo Bay prison. It avoids political posturing and gets down the human interaction between guards and prisoners, while avoiding the usual prison clichés.
Superbly unsettling. Pointedly highlights how incarceration dehumanizes inmate and guard alike. Kristen Stewart's steeliness is perfectly suited to its ironies.
Writer-director Sattler keeps the drama small and intimate, between two people, focusing on the minutiae of daily life inside the prison and letting us draw the moral implications.
The final reel of Camp X-Ray is actually kinda terrible, but that's not enough to undo all the excellence that has come before. At least not for me.
This could be the film that shows the world that Kristen Stewart actually can act. An interesting, if somewhat fictitious story about a prison guard, isolated and outcast from her peers, striking a friendship with a terrorist subject charged with 9/11. Engaging and very well done.
Super Reviewer
Deliberately monotonous in parts, Camp X-Ray won't be for everyone but the drama invested here seems genuine and the two lead performances are striking. Impressive.
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