Remember when you were a kid, and mom and dad slid a steaming plate of Brussels sprouts, or spinach, or broccoli in front of you, and commanded, "Eat it. It's good for you!" You know now that they were right. And even back then, you probably had some sense that it was probably the right thing to do. That didn't make the experience any more enjoyable, though. Nanking, a new documentary produced by Washington Capitals owner and former AOL exec Ted Leonsis, is sort of like that plate of vegetables.

At last week's local premiere at his alma mater, Georgetown, Leonsis talked about the genesis of the project. How, while on a cruise in the Caribbean, he saw an obituary for Iris Chang, whose book, The Rape of Nanking, helped to bring attention to one of the largely forgotten (by the western world anyway) atrocities of World War II. He picked up a copy, and decided immediately that a film needed to be made to educate the public as to the horrific events that occurred in the former Chinese capital in the winter of 1937-38.

First and foremost, Leonsis should be commended for taking such an interest and making the documentary possible. As he said during the post-film Q&A, the occupation of Nanking simply doesn't appear in most Western history textbooks. When the Japanese army invaded the city in December of 1937, they killed more than 200,000 people, and estimates of the number of women raped run well into the tens of thousands, including infants and the elderly. They ravaged the city and huge numbers of its inhabitants, making it hard to know the exact extent of the catastrophe. But whatever the numbers, the levels of destruction, murder, and general depravity were staggering. It's the sort of thing that we should, as the saying goes, never forget. Leonsis stated that his goal is to have a billion people around the world eventually view the film, and we wish him luck. It's a noble effort. We just wish we could more wholeheartedly recommend the carrier of that message.

Historical documentaries can be tricky animals. When documenting events 70 years in the past, most of the witnesses are gone, and most of the visual record, if there is any, consists of still photographs. The written record is in articles and journals from people long dead. It can make for awfully dry material, with endless Ken Burns-ian panning over photos with somber narrators reading out the words of the deceased. Directors Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman were fortunate in that a number of survivors of Nanking are still alive, and they were able to talk firsthand about their experiences, mostly as children, during the occupation. Where things get difficult is their storytelling angle and the device they used to get there.

An important part of the Nanking story is the large number of Westerners who populated the city before the attack. Many left quickly when word came down of the advancing army, but a handful stayed, and were instrumental in saving thousands upon thousands of the citizenry by setting up a safe zone in the city, and using to their advantage the reluctance of the Japanese to cross Americans and Germans at the time. These people, their story having obvious mirrors to that of Oskar Schindler (particularly since the man elected to lead the safe zone was a Nazi), are rightly regarded as heroes by the Chinese people, but Nanking makes the mistake of making them the reason for telling the story, and the central focus. The film would benefit from more time spent with the survivors, and less with the actors tasked with "playing" the Westerners.

Which brings us to the second misstep the film takes. All of the Westerners who set up and administered the Nanking safe zone are gone, but many kept detailed journals of their time there. In an attempt to bring their words to life, to give the dish a little more flavor like some cheese sauce on that childhood broccoli, Guttentag and Sturman bring in a group of actors, including Woody Harrelson, Mariel Hemingway, and Stephen Dorff, who engage in a stage reading (with a vague approximation of costuming) of the diaries, each playing a different role. Cheese, unfortunately, is exactly what this comes off as. They look directly into the camera (some quite obviously reading from teleprompters) and engage in maudlin and hopelessly hokey readings of the material. While meant to give life to the characters, it succeeds only in taking the viewer out of the story, which is best left to the survivors to tell.

Nanking's most effective, most devastating moments all involve the people who were there, and the surviving visual records. There's the survivor who breaks down in tears as he describes the brutal murder of his sibling; the elderly woman who is eerily calm in her description of her own rape as a young girl; the chilling footage of smiling and jovial Japanese army officers talking casually about the atrocities they committed. Most of all, there is the 16mm film smuggled out by one of the Westerners that is presented without sound and without narration, showing what happened in stark and honest detail. Nanking uses these primary sources with razor sharp accuracy. It's a shame, then, that so much of the story ends up in the hands of a bunch of over-emoting movie stars. The overall effect is a film that everyone should see, but that you're not going to enjoy too much. To which we can only say, "Watch it. It's good for you."

Opens today at the Avalon.