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Point and Shoot (2014)
Other reviews were so bad I had to write this
Ostensibly, the film shows the self-documented experiences of Matthew VanDyck, an American who goes on a motorcycle adventure through the "Arab" countries of Africa and the Middle East and then finds himself fighting in a Libyan War as a rebel soldier. On a deeper level the film explores the personal growth of a man leading a sheltered, coddled, and lonely life with obsessive compulsive disorder that discovers the joys of friendship, understands the value of moral obligation to those friends, and experiences severely challenging and life-changing events from the rare perspective of an American fighting among Muslims.
The general arc of the film is that VanDyck went to Africa and the Middle East because he was inspired to create an adventure documentary that would depict his transformation into a "real man" through travels on his motorcycle. The reality was that his transformation into a real man occurred through the relationships and friends he developed, notably his random friendship with a Libyan man named Nuri that shapes much of his personal growth as he develops a close bond with Nuri's Libyan friends that he did not have growing up. At that point in the film, the story could have ended with him returning home to his girlfriend with a bunch of neat travel experiences and a sense of how to take care of himself and others but then the Arab Spring happens and he feels a moral obligation to return to Libya to help his friends achieve their goal of freedom from an authoritarian regime. Obviously, you could belittle his motives here and this is where some of the armchair quarterbacks of the world might feel that his actions were self- centered and reflective of his earlier tendency to document a heroic version of himself but a reasonable understanding of events would assume that no sane person would subject themselves to the horrors of war and risk torture, permanent injury, or death simply to memorialize themselves. This idiotic urge to belittle such actions come from those who have clearly experienced very little outside of their bubble of urban comfort or feel the need to pompously strut their egos out for online self-worth. Here is a guy with OCD, something that typically becomes a crippling problem, going far out of his comfort zone to do what he feels is "right". His friends are in the midst of a violent conflict and he feels obligated to help them.
The film structure of a documentary about the experience of VanDyck as documented by himself seems to have jarred some viewers who are accustomed to being deluded or fooled by the illusion of the filmmaker as an invisible storyteller. The false perception of VanDyck as narcissistic could be explained by the belief some hold that documentary films are free of bias and only depict authentic experiences of "true" reality. Scenes where he is shown filming himself riding his motorcycle or where he is asked to shoot and kill someone might come across as narcissistic but if the purpose of his documentation was to tell a story then he needs to record even moments that reflect poorly on his character or the motivations of his actions so they can be remembered with the moral ambiguity or imperfection exactly as it happened and not just some rehearsed version of things.
In his own narrative he reveals that he finds frequent conflict over his role as a participant as well as a documentarian and that many of his subjects frequently request staging of their photos so they're memorialized a certain way. VanDyck clearly knows that he doesn't have all the answers and many of his decisions were challenging because of their moral ambiguity. On the one hand he feels guilty for leaving his girlfriend and his mom behind while risking his life and making them worry, but on the other hand he feels obligated to helping his friends achieve their goal of living in a free country and while some might see this as a grandiose sense of self-importance I think it's more the reality of the war starting out as a collection of poorly organized civilians with no military experience doing whatever they could to fight against the violent crackdowns of Gaddafi's government. He felt that he could contribute in a meaningful way and didn't think it was fair to settle down with the comforts of his ordinary life while leaving his friends dying in a violent war. I don't think you can question that if you weren't there making the same choices about people you care about that are dying. This narrative is reasonably well depicted in the film.
The unique perspective of the film being about various self-filmed experiences lends it a more genuine self-awareness than other self-filmed things that most people see on YouTube where there's never any questioning of the person's motivations because there is no camera on the camera showing what actually goes into the production of the one "perfect" shot or the editorial decisions made to tell just the right story.
Perhaps my review focused too much on defending the film against its critics, but I think that perspective could help future viewers. What I found most compelling about the film was the general narrative of VanDyck's personal growth from a sheltered, OCD kid whose mom and grandma did his laundry and bought his groceries to someone who went on a solo motorcycle adventure in a relatively hazardous part of the world to someone that understood the value of freedom and friendship and chose to participate as a soldier in a violent conflict out of moral obligation and that all of these things existed within the context of ordinary Libyans struggling with problems that most of us take for granted. I appreciate the film's ability to sharpen how I perceive my first world problems in the context of a radically different perspective.