This is more worth your time than a thousand Superman flicks, but probably very few people are going to see it. ‘Dirty Wars’ doesn’t appear to have a big promotional budget, and politically sensitive documentaries aren’t common in multiplexes.

You should probably be one of the people who does see it, if it’s showing where you live or if it ends up in some sort of VOD situation you can access.

The movie is about the effect of our wars on the civilian populations trapped inside of them, and about the outsourced, semi-private war machine we’ve built. He tells the story mostly in interviews with Afghani locals, and it’s fairly effective. It’s easy to forget the grinding poverty of the people of Afghanistan. It’s easy to forget that they don’t have any power over the Taliban, or any way to hold their junta to account. Despite all of this, the sins of their captors are visited upon them with an offhand cruelty we probably ought to examine, and it’s hard to ignore when you’re looking at them.

If you’re a regular news reader, I’m not sure there will be much you haven’t heard or suspected, even the most awful stuff. What is surprising is how insanely little we’ve gotten to see from the ground, how quickly we’ve become adjusted to embedded reporters who have no incentive to do anything more than stenography.

Scahill is a bit vain, and he has an unshaven, shabby-chic muckraker brand he’s trying to advance. To that end, there are a goodly number of meaningless shots of him looking scruffily handsome and lost in thought, but that’s not a reason not to watch. It’s worth overlooking that to get a glimpse at the machinations of war even slightly divergent from the sanitized, State-sanctioned story all the networks are telling.