Tillman Story

Year: 2010

Grade: B+

Country: USA

Director: Bar-Lev

Review

documentary that dissects the media response to pat tillman’s death in iraq. everyone knows the story about tillman – left the nfl to go to iraq after 9/11 and was killed in battle. turns out it was a case of friendly fire and was covered up by the military. as is typical by those in power, humanity means nothing to them, they just manipulate the circumstances to their benefit and move on. later, when the truth comes out, people are too distracted by other things to get outraged. the initial lie is always more powerful than the truth that is eventually revealed. if it was revealed tomorrow that jfk was killed as part of a conspiracy or that 9/11 was an inside job there would be outrage, but it would be a shadow of the sadness and anger that followed the initial events and the purported truth of the early coverage.

the documentary gets a lot of interview footage from the parents and family of tillman and they sort of debunk the idea of this macho numbskull football player who was gung ho about war. he was a patriot, sure, but he read chomsky and didn’t like how the war was going. he didn’t fit the typical solider archetype that was portrayed by the media. seemed to be a thoughtful and relatively good guy who believed in actual sacrifice and committment.