Ultimately I respect director Armstrong's production and ambition for trying something new with its short format and wanting to tell a story that's more epic than its budget would allow. "War is a Bitch" is a movie with potential and with a better budget, it can rise to be something of a look at humanity and female combatants. However as it stands as a short film it's really just a war film that takes pages from "Bladerunner." And as I sat I couldn't help but wonder what the whole intent of the film was. Is it another trite take on the ugliness of humanity? Is it just a look at the horror of war? More importantly, is it just yet another heavy handed metaphor for homosexuality? Armstrong definitely seems to want to go all over the place with a moral that just drops on to all forms of social commentary where our heroine Hope is caught in a war with a troop of female soldiers who are in the middle of a battle involving a dictatorial regime that bred Clones that they now must hunt. The big brother organization bred these clones for reasons not fully explained and it's their mission to find the clones and kill them. But then Armstrong integrates a series of convenient plot twists and deus ex machinas that just make no sense in the end.
 

For example Hope is ambushed by her clone, is hung, her clone assumes her identity, Hope is presumed dead, but we later learn that Hope is just a clone whose memory was conveniently erased while in the scuffle with the original Hope, thus she had no recollection of being a clone at all. So... why did she realize she had a massive bomb with her in the finale? Did the "father" of the regime give it to her?

Did she put it on herself? Are the clones assigned to self-destruct? And why didn't she notice she had a massive bomb strapped to her stomach in the first place? And what was with the plot involving Hope and her commanding officer? Was she a lesbian? If so why did she call her commanding officer "mother"? In either case, "War is a Bitch" is rife with possibilities that it never can live up to, in the end. The characters are under developed as hard as Armstrong tries to add exposition in the short time; for example there's a female character donning white face paint, ruby red lips, and dark black eyeliner. So... is she a cyborg, or a goth? Meanwhile, the acting is hammy all across the board. The women all play the parts to the best of their ability, but the dialogue is so stilted they can never seem to believe what they're spewing. The final monologue from Bern Cohen is rather hokey with his play as a supreme ruler something of a cliche instead of adding an extra touch of menace. As expressed "War is a Bitch" feels like a mini-budget movie anxious to break out and become a massive science fiction epic, and never quite rises above sub-par, in the end.