Taxi To The Dark Side Is Incredibly Haunting And Informative Documentary Fare

At the dawn of the 21st century, America was forever altered by the September 11th attacks that took countless lives and is still reverberating through our society today. Specifically, 9/11 was the impetus behind our Middle East military conflict that has been ongoing for over a decade, making it one of the longest wars fought by American forces. In the first few years of said conflict, controversy emerged over how our military forces were treating detained individuals from whom we were hoping to extract information about the whereabouts Al-Queda Intel and weaponry. How were they getting this information? Through gruesome torture techniques that violated international law.


This is the sordid topic that the 2007 documentary Taxi To The Dark Side focuses on as it examines the mistreatment of detainees held at Middle Eastern bases and in Guantanamo Bay. While one of the most prolific events regarding this topic (which was photographs taken by various U.S. soldiers posing with naked and mistreated prisoners) was dismissed by higher-ups as an anomaly, Taxi to The Dark Side posits that this was far from an aberration in the world of interrogation by U.S. forces in this era. In fact, such horrific mistreatment seems to be keeping in line with public statements made by the likes of then Vice-President Dick Cheney that made it clear U.S. forces would be getting the information they want to receive by any means necessary, no matter how brutal.

This hideous phenomenon is anchored by the tale of Dilawar, a taxi driver in Afghanistan who was picked up and mistakenly thought of as a potential suspect in a recent attack on a U.S. base. Diliwar was repeatedly beaten and tortured over his subsequent time spent in detainment and eventually died.
It's an incredibly stomach-churning event, one that serves a gruesome but effective distillation of the problems evident in America's fixation on torture as one-size-fits-all solution for getting potentially valuable information. The tales of soldiers and their superiors doing these kinds of actions against human beings was always going to be impactful to some degree but director Alex Gibney is smart to start off the film with this personal account of one man being impacted by the U.S.'s newfound obsession with torture.

This way, people like myself that may not have been as aware of this issue prior to watching Taxi To The Dark Side have a more intimate introduction to the controversial topic at hand before the feature dives into a larger-scale exploration of said topic. While the film stretches across numerous topics, Dilawar's presence does loom larger over the entire movie, including in an impactful ending that has his family mourning over the loss of their loved one. Alex Gibney's documentary realizes just how impactful and important it is to witness first-hand footage that shows how it affects everyday individuals who have lost the people they love to senseless violence. Giving the viewer a visual manifestation of the horrors a reliance on torture techniques has wrought is one of Taxi To The Dark Side's most brilliant moves as a feature film

Having its opening sequence establish an intimate humanistic plot thread the entire film can get wrapped up in is a brilliant move for Taxi To The Dark Side on a structural level. This movie is also notably skillful when it comes to relaying more complex details in a satisfying manner. Interview subjects and archival footage is utilized conveying information regarding foreign policy, the history of torture techniques and other complicated topics in a succinct manner that allows for both more naive viewers (again, a category I did fall into prior to watching this film) to easily understand what's going on and making sure the pacing of the entire motion picture isn't bogged down by overly excessive explanations.

Speaking of the various interview segments, those, like the sequences chronicling Dilawar's family, are similarly impactful by how they involve a large sum of U.S. soldiers and another individual who was (like Dilawar) detained at a U.S. base. All of these forthcoming first-hand accounts, years after they were involved in various torture-related routines, of what was going on at these U.S. bases was shocking and various accompanying filmed sequences, most notably one depicting what kind of visual and auditory torture one detainee underwent by way of some intentionally unnerving editing and color grading, help drive the horrific points these interview segments are trying to get across home.

By the time Taxi To The Dark Side ends, we've come to almost the end of the Bush administration (remember, this came out in 2007, about a year prior to Barack Obama's election) and the film's concentration on U.S. government issues, such as how Bush and other higher-ups in the government were passing legislation to ensure themselves pardons in case legal action is taken against them regarding all the heavy use of torture techniques, demonstrate how much the scope of the movie has organically and naturally expanded over the course of its runtime. But it all ends on a return to a more intimate note, as Dilawar's family contemplates how much his death has impacted them. Alex Gibney's Taxi To The Dark Side is gut-wrenching, informative and haunting, quite frequently capturing all those words at once.