I just watched this documentary on HBO. While it was well done, watching it was among the saddest, most heart wrenching experiences I've had in watching any movie. The grief and agony of the families and friends of those brave men and women who are interred in Section 60 was so incredibly palpable, my heart goes out to all of them.

As with Jon Alpert's 'Alive Day Memories' - which moved too fast through war survivors' stories to get the full impact, I once again found myself feeling guilty for not being more moved.

This is an unflinching portrait of the grieving of families who lost loved ones in Iraq and Afghanistan. While it can't help but be affecting for a while, the endless parade of so many weeping faces starts to become numbing not moving. It also starts to feels a dangerously on the edge of exploitive.

Certainly that's not the intent. And given that in our recent wars the government has been careful to hide the bodies, coffins and death there's a real social value to being reminded that these were real young men and women - parents, children, spouses - dying over there. But by moving so quickly from one grieving family to the next, there's a missed chance to get to know these people (women mostly) left behind to try and carry on as more than just symbols of loss.

I loved Alpert's 'Baghdad ER' because it did the opposite of these two more recent parts of what became a trilogy about the Iraq war. It turned the soldiers and the doctors fighting to save them into real, complete, complex human beings, and not just symbols of war, bravery and devastation

This is a tough review to write. I need to say up front that I respect our men and women in the military who fight for freedom across the globe. These brave souls deserve our all, and seeing the final resting places of those who didn't make it is humbling in the extreme.

But if we're going to be honest about reviewing this documentary, then we have to do it objectively (i.e., without emotions, and an eye toward education and informing the general public).

My first big problem is that there's very little information given on SECTION 60; about it's formation, the battle for more space for grave sites, who oversees the care of the grounds, and how the families of the deceased view these aspects. Instead, the camera is relegated to basically being a fly on the wall while families visit the cemetery. We see families cry, touch headstones, leave trinkets for their dearly departed, and listen to them mourn. And that is the entirety of the film. It is also focused almost entirely on those soldiers killed in the current Middle East conflicts, with nothing noted about the surrounding soldiers who've been there since Vietnam, Korea and beyond.

Another big problem is that there were too many lingering shots of headstones. Headstones being cleaned. Headstones with the sun setting behind them. Headstones with jelly beans on them. This might not have been too bad if the documentarians had included informational dialogue during a few of them. But the shots are eerily silent, making it seem more macabre than packing any sort of emotional punch. Too, I found these overly-long shots (sorry to say) exceptionally boring.

Let's not forget that these brave men and women died so that we might live, too. Life is for the living, not the dead. And it is the living and how they deal with what's left to them that I would've found more fascinating than this current documentary.