A confused, compelling look at troops living it up in Iraq

Michael Tucker, the codirector and narrator of ''Gunner Palace," speaks in an ominous stage whisper not unlike Rod Serling's. And the militarized Baghdad his absorbing documentary finds is often like an episode of ''The Twilight Zone."

In the midst of a war teeming with ambivalent Iraqi citizens and such dangers as improvised explosive devices and the insurgents who plant them, the troops are having a pretty good time.

They're members of the Army's 2/3 Field Artillery Division, and they've moved into the half-destroyed estate of Saddam Hussein's assassinated son Uday, nicknaming it Gunner Palace.

It has a swimming pool, a golf course, and a lake for fishing. There's a mayor, a house band, and several town criers who rap for the camera. Tucker spent two months or so with the Army after the fall of Baghdad, and we are there to see soldiers on the links and flipping into the pool. We are there for Gunnerpalooza 4, a blowout thrown after a raid on a local sheik yields a small weapons cache and $48,000 in Iraqi dinar.

This, as one officer says from a makeshift concert stage, is ''an adult paradise, just for you."

Tucker came to Iraq to make a documentary about the security business and wound up with a faint and sometimes opportunistic echo of Robert Altman's ''M*A*S*H." This is a strange, surreal place where the pursuit of leisure produces a sort of comic moral irony: Is it right to bring spring break to someone else's country during wartime?

''Gunner Palace" evokes the major war pictures of the last 35 years, from Altman's movie and ''Apocalypse Now" (Wagner's ''Ride of the Valkyries" makes a cameo) to ''Platoon" and ''Three Kings." While Tucker's film has neither the power nor the inspiration of any of them, it's still a film of the moment. He and codirector Petra Epperlein employ a jerky you-are-there camera strategy that recalls certain combat video games, and the filmmakers lean on a combination of speed-metal and hip-hop, the former, presumably, for revved up atmosphere and the latter for ''truth."

The movie opens with Tucker's portentous narrated diagnosis of what American television viewers know and don't know about the military situation in Iraq. ''Most of us don't see this on the news anymore," he says. ''We have reality TV, instead! 'Joe Millionaire,' 'Survivor.' Well, survive this: a year in Baghdad without changing the channel!" There's more where that came from.

In fact, the movie does so much editorializing that the troops of the 2/3 are dragged, unfairly, into its whirlpool of judgment. The filmmakers seem content to leave us with the impression that Gunner Palace is a beerless frat house peopled by thrill-seeking Americans who don't know what to think of their assignment. The psychological reality is probably that they need these shenanigans as a defense against depression or insanity.

The movie also pleads for our sympathy without being necessarily sympathetic itself. Specialist Stuart Wilf is the biggest clown on display (see him put a mop on his head and impersonate an imam), but the film closes with his written observation that while politicians are home eating dinner, he and his fellow soldiers are risking their lives.

As confused as it is, ''Gunner Palace" works purely as a series of complex snapshots of the conflict in Iraq. One Iraqi offers his eloquent assessment of his country's wounded psyche. And the movie takes us on several ride-alongs with the night patrols, a few of which end in presumably innocent Iraqis being deported to Abu Ghraib prison, where now well-documented horrors await.

Being this deeply immersed forces us to question what the whole war is good for, and in a way that goes beyond personal politics. The men and women fighting it aren't always clear about why. Watching them vacillate in this movie, neither are we.

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.