Detainee 001

9/6/2022

Detainee 001 is a carrot-and-stick sort of documentary. The carrot is elusive “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh, captured as an enemy combatant during the November 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. The stick comes when the movie ends, and we realize that Lindh remains pretty much the same cipher wrapped in an enigma smothered in secret sauce that he was before the film (the very title is misleading, considering that Lindh was captured simultaneously with 85 other prisoners). I'm always wary of documentaries about a living person wherein that person is nowhere to be found. Director Greg Barker doesn’t interview Lindh (who appears exclusively in archival footage that turns out to be underwhelming regardless of how “never-before-seen” it may be), and how he could he?; by his own admissio