“The Torture Question” begins with night-footage of Abu Ghraib. As way of introduction to the movie, the narrator tells us that one prisoner asks Frontline’s cameraman “is this Abu Ghraib?” after which the narrator points out in a grave tone that “they have heard about the Americans at Abu Ghraib... Many have seen the pictures... No doubt, these men expect the worst.” The documentary then takes the viewers in chronological order through the events leading up to the torture at Abu Ghraib, beginning with the September 11th attacks on the Pentagon, guiding us through the military strike against Afghanistan and the creation of the Bagram prison, extraordinary rendition, Rumpsfeld’s attempt to “get Geneva out of the way,” the creation of Guantanamo and the subsequent escalation of “interrogation techniques” that happened there, the bombing of Baghdad and the increasing insurgency attacks in Iraq, and finally back to Abu Ghraib. All this happens in 90 minutes.

Compounding this overload of information are clips of thirteen different interviews with different people, ranging from the infamous John Yoo to Tony Lagouranis, a U.S Army interrogator at Abu Ghraib. Each interview was interesting in and of itself, and certainly a wide range of views is useful in fleshing out this controversial issue. However, there were so many different voices being heard and so many different stories to follow that the end result was that viewers found themselves lost in an excess of narratives.

Unfortunately the visuals did not help this documentary either. Slow zooms into various arbitrary objects were overly bountiful, including many a shot of the Whitehouse and various statues in front of the Whitehouse, as well as seemingly random clips of helicopters and hummers. Worst of all were the clips of declassified documents. Multiple times during the documentary, our very serious male voice would read us sections of declassified memos and reports as the camera would slowly zoom in on these documents, and a yellow “highlighter” line ran across the sentence that was being read. Unfortunately, the camera always ended up zooming in so close that not only would we find ourselves staring at only two or three words, but the letters were so close they became blurry. To its credit, Frontline did its best to incorporate news footage, and the now-familiar images associated with the war on terror all made their way into the documentary, including footage of bombings in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Iraqi crowd dragging a the head of a statue of Saddam Hussein through the streets of Baghdad, and of course the photos recording the sexual abuse that happened at Abu Ghraib in, as our narrator puts it (in between overly long pauses,) “the prison within the prison.... the hard site... “ (This is followed by what is perhaps my favorite line of the entire documentary. Our narrator points out that “it was inside cell blocks A and B... that the bad things happened.”)

For all of its faults, however, “the Torture Question” did have a few poignant moments. For example, there is footage included of a “home-video” of U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib reenacting what they do to prisoners, using a stuffed duffle bag as the prisoner. In this video they end up stabbing the duffle bag multiple times with a large knife, as well as utterly destroying several collapsible chairs in the same room. This episode ironically helps to show us the humanity of these soldiers stuck in a high-stress and inhumane environment. Furthermore, the photos of Abu Ghraib are shown at the beginning of the movie in black and white, then again at the end of the movie in color, signifying that it is only after learning about the entire sequence of events that led to this terrible lapse in humanity that we can truly see these photos for all that they are worth. “The Torture Question,” therefore, does a very good job of laying out a basic historical storyline, so as to leave its viewers more fully informed of both why the U.S. government felt they needed to use such hardened “interrogation techniques” as well as knowledge of the many people along the way who felt their government was going too far. Where the film fails, however, is in engaging its audience.

If anything, what we have learned in Global Media are the basics of how to make a good documentary; one that will sell. What we have returned to again and again is the concept that a documentary should either be formed around a characterization (tracing one or a small number of characters throughout their “journeys,”) or a specific theme. Frontline’s “the Torture Question” does neither, but rather follows the format of a very long news piece. The narrator’s voice, seemingly borrowed from the “History Channel,” the stale images, and the gratuitous amounts of information and numerous talking heads all serve to lose the viewers attention, and it is only thanks to the incredibly interesting topic that I personally continued to listen. However, as Alex Gibney’s “Taxi to the Dark Side” shows, there are more gripping ways to tell this story. Perhaps it is because my skin has been hardened, due to having previously viewed Gibney’s documentary on the same topic and also having watched an entire semester’s worth of depressing documentaries, but most likely had I flipped across “the Torture Question” on television, chances are I would have kept flipping.

Frontline’s “the Torture Question” is available online, along with transcripts of all of the interviews conducted, at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/torture/