Combat Obscura

2019 • 70 minutes

About this movie

Just out of high school, at the age of 18, Miles Lagoze enlisted in the Marine Corps. He was deployed to Afghanistan where he served as Combat Camera — his unit's official videographer, tasked with shooting and editing footage for the Corps’ recruiting purposes and historical initiatives. But upon discharging, Lagoze took all the footage he and his fellow cameramen shot, and he assembled quite simply the very documentary the Corps does not want you to see. COMBAT OBSCURA is a groundbreaking look at the daily life of Marines in a war zone as told by the soldiers themselves. More than a mere compilation of violence, the edit ingeniously repurposes the original footage to reveal the intensity and paradoxes of an ambiguous war from an unvarnished perspective.

Ratings and reviews

I served in Afghanistan in 2009. This documentary shows the side of war that most Americans would rather turn a blind eye to. It shows the viewer a glimpse of what is known by all grunts, but rarely spoken of to uninitiated; the rampant drug use, the blurred lines of liberal ROEs, the cover-ups for mistakes, the lies we tell to fit the official narrative according to our orders. This is hard to watch, and definitely not a feel-good piece of propaganda. This documentary will not leave you with a feeling of pride for America. This documentary will not leave you admiring the bravery of front line troops. This documentary will hopefully leave you questioning the point of an endless war that destroys lives, young and old, American and Afghan.

I watch a lot of combat footage and I wasn't disappointed at all. It's not narrated but i do think it's edited in a way to show a mood. You could get a good sense of the danger, the fear and the anger.

horrible!!!! I felt like this was just a bunch of YouTube clips put together into one long movie. weird angles alot of running with the camera just bad over all I could never get into the movie.