The Inspection

Director: Elegance Bratton (USA). Year of Release: 2022

New Jersey, 2005. Four years after the US “won” the Iraq war “in two weeks”. So why is the television news still attacks by the Iraqi resistance? A young black man wakes up in the room of beds he shares with dozens of other (presumably homeless) men. He nips down to the subway station and jumps over the barriers and into the next train. When he gets to his stop, he picks up a bunch of flowers and knocks on his mother’s door.

Her first words – the first words we hear in the film – are “Are you in trouble?” He says No, he just needs his birth certificate so he can enlist to become a Marine. She demurs, and leaves the door chain fastened. When he finally convinces her to let him in, she puts paper on top of the settee before he sits down. It is nearly a decade since she threw out the then 16-year old Ellis because of his lifestyle. The religious programme on the radio suggests that she hasn’t changed her mind.

The film introduces itself with the title card: “inspired by a true story”. This irritated me more than it should. The usual version of this phrase is “based on a true story”, which means that the writer read about something interesting, then sexed it up beyond recognition. If something is “inspired by” rather than just “based on”, surely it will have even less basis in reality? Turns out I was worrying unnecessarily, and The Inspection Is a relatively true account of director Elegance Bratton’s early life.

Induction into the Marines is just as dehumanizing as we’ve been led to believe by 1000 other films. The snarly drill sergeant Laws and his cohorts bark questions at the new recruits: “Are you a Communist?”, “Have you recently smoked marijuana?”, “Have you ever been convicted of a felony?” “Are you a homosexual?” Laws is a veteran of Desert Storm who doesn’t think that today’s generation is up to snuff. He promises to break them, growling: “I hate recruits, but I love Marines.”

The young men are stripped of any sense of individuality, and banned from using the word “I”. Instead they must use elaborate constructions like “this recruit wants permission to speak”. They are referred to by their surnames – from now on, Ellis is called French by the officers and Frenchie by the more sympathetic men. He is shouted at, beaten, and bullied – both by their officers and his fellow soldiers (who’d have thought that the Marines would be full of violent squaddies?)

Although at an early parade scene, we see a number of women recruits, this is the last we hear of them. It’s not just that The Inspection lacks any scenes of two women speaking to each other about anything other than a man. Apart from Ellis’s prison guard mother I don’t think that any other woman has a speaking role. Which might prove a point about the toxic masculinity endemic to the Marines, but hardly makes for an atmosphere which is pleasant to watch.

Ellis is caught with an erection in the communal showers which proves that he must be gay. I don’t doubt that macho soldiers might follow this sort of logic, but it seems to be the film’s narrative (and that of most reviews that I’ve read) that 25-year old men, only get a sudden rush of blood when they are sexually aroused. Which seems to show a fundamental lack of understanding of how a young man’s penis works. It’s a little quibble, but seems unnecessary for such a central plot point.

After Ellis is outed, Laws orders that he should be the last one to leave the showers, and then leaves the room. Ellis is given a beating, and left bleeding on the floor. One of the people who assaults him is Black, but the other two have a certain neo-Nazi look about them. It is unclear whether they were beating him for his sexuality, for his colour, or both. Even his Black tormentor may just have been joining in to prevent himself becoming the victim of a future attack.

Around an hour of this 90 minute film consists almost exclusively of men being aggressive to each other. But it is worth sitting through this unpleasantness because at least it exposes the brutality of the army and serves as a warning to anyone who might see it as a way out of poverty, right? Well not really. The film follows every cliché in the book, and (hardly a spoiler because it’s so fucking obvious) Ellis overcomes all his hardships to become a proud Marine.

Rather than denouncing the brutality, The Inspection seems to be putting a case for the army as an agency of liberation – not just for the Afghanis who went to the wrong wedding party, but for the soldiers themselves. In the trenches (or whatever the modern warfare equivalent is) there is no room for prejudice, you just need to look out for the man to the left of you and the man to the right of you. Yes, we may witness racism and homophobia, but the message is that Marines look after their own.

Some of Ellis’s soldiers end up supporting him, one even disobeying a direct order. The implication is that the army is some sort of proto-socialist organisation where everyone takes care of each other, and the shouty brutes giving orders are only there by accident. When Laws drowns Ellis, nearly killing him, it is hard to avoid the thought that this is supposed to be character building, and not the act of a homicidal maniac who has found his perfect job.

With Ellis due to graduate, his mother returns, but she’s not lost any of her old prejudices. She refuses to accept her son when he tells her that the Marines have failed make him straight. She asks Laws how he could ignore what is perfectly obvious. Why can’t they see that their new recruit is gay? Laws dismisses her, saying that sexuality doesn’t matter. What’s important is that you’re a Marine. When pressed, he says “we did not ask Ma’am and he did not tell.”

“Don’t ask, don’t tell” was one of the most egregious policies of the Clinton administration. Having ostensibly campaigned for gay rights, Clinton introduced the compromise of allowing gay men to serve in the military as long as they didn’t talk about their sexuality. This had the double effect of increasing the stigma which forces gays and lesbians into the closet whilst using the liberal façade to promote the US army as something other than a megalomaniac agent of imperialism.

This film is very much in the same tradition. Like its hero, it glorifies the military, and revels in his progress through the ranks. Towards the end, we see Ellis proudly staring at himself in the mirror with his military uniform. Sure, there may be some bad apples, but even they are redeemable. And besides, what’s the alternative? Ellis says that his prime motivation for signing up is that most of his friends are dead or in prison, and at least he’d die a hero, and not just another homeless faggot.

Politics aside, The Inspection is just very dull. Most films about army recruits start to drag after the first couple of minutes of people doing the same routine exercises over and over again, yet this monotony takes up most of the film. And there’s not much we haven’t seen countless times before. There is no real discussion outside the predictable action. We are left with an “issues” film which is either not prepared to ask any difficult questions, or maybe it’s just not interested.