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This raises a number of interesting psychological, even spiritual, questions. Why do banal niceties like smiling for the camera overcome moral revulsion at the degradation of fellow human beings? Which is more reflective of the human heart? Is superficial politeness more deeply ingrained in us than moral backbone? And how much can we really tell from a photo, which after all captures only a sliver of time? Why are we so quick to believe such images, and to judge people by them?

Morris is especially interested in these latter questions. It turns out one of the most infamous photos—of the hooded man standing on the box with the wires attached to his fingers—is one of the more innocuous pictures, relatively speaking. The wires didn't lead to any actual electricity, and the man in question, nicknamed "Gilligan," reportedly got along fairly well with the troops. But there are other pictures that show far worse things, such as men being forced to masturbate; and the cameras missed some of the worst actions altogether, catching only their aftermath, such as when one detainee died during an interrogation and his body was placed on ice.

Re-enacting the abuse at Abu Ghraib

As with most of his other films, Morris heightens the emotions and underscores key details through dramatic re-enactments and surging music—which still sounds like the work of his frequent collaborator Philip Glass even though, this time, it is provided by Danny Elfman (Spider-Man 1 & 2, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). As other critics have noted, these techniques are "standard operating procedure" for Morris, but it is not clear that they belong in this particular film, or that they suit this particular subject matter.

In The Thin Blue Line, the re-enactments raised doubts about conflicting testimonies; in A Brief History of Time and The Fog of War, they brought visual style to films that could very easily have been nothing but monologues by academics and politicians. But in Standard Operating Procedure, the Abu Ghraib photos themselves are horrific enough that Morris can do little but give us images that are even more horrific, or horror-movie-ish, and the end result seems like overkill. Better is the scene where England discusses being in love with Graner and an ironically sweet bit of music plays over home-movie footage of him playing with a cat, which makes you wonder all sorts of things about his relationship to other living beings, including people.

But that sort of focus, itself, will pose a problem for some viewers. For many people, the story of Abu Ghraib is not just the story of abuses at one facility, and it is not just a bad episode in a larger story; for them, it is symbolic of the story as a whole. Morris does allow one or two interviewees to make brief arguments against the Iraq War itself, and he does underscore the fact that even some of the "standard" interrogation procedures—the ones that were not considered criminal or abusive—were pretty questionable, to say the least. But the film keeps its focus so narrowly on this one prison that it may not satisfy those who want a larger exposé of the political and military culture that made places like Abu Ghraib possible in the first place.

There is also the lingering question of whether it is "too soon" to reflect on things like this in the way that Morris clearly wants to do. I do not mean whether it is "too soon" to discuss criminal acts; journalists should pounce on that sort of thing as soon as they know about it. Rather, I refer to the fact that Morris's films have typically looked back over the decades and featured characters who were putting their lives into some sort of perspective, years after the chips fell where they may. (Even The Thin Blue Line, which got an innocent man out of jail, came out a dozen years after the crime for which he was accused, and has some striking moments of self-reflection by the various people involved in his case.) Those films have, in a sense, transcended their subject matter in a quest for deeper meaning—but the wounds of Abu Ghraib are still so fresh, we may not be ready to transcend them just yet.

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