Lone Survivor
Don't Go! Too war-nographic.
Realistic, hardcore, Navy SEAL warfest.
US Navy SEALs vs the Taliban. Afghanistan 2005. Mission goes awry. Four soldiers. One Lone Survivor. Simple.
In overwhelmingly large part, Lone Survivor is a true story and perhaps just one of many similar stories that will never be told. It is a fictionalised version of how real soldiers died in a widely-questioned war, which most certainly gives it plenty of intrigue, but equally places it on the edge of mainstream palatability.
The eponymous Lone Survivor - Marcus Luttrell - is played by Mark Wahlberg (Ted). Fortunately the film is very clearly not about his star quality, nor should it be. He plays his character with an understated modesty that is befitting considering the very serious nature of the film. This is made easier because the script is reasonably straightforward, even to the point of being noticeably ordinary. This reflects the evident desire of the director, Peter Berg (Hancock), for the film to feel like it crawled over to us from the most foreign, violent and incomprehensible desert of human experience bleeding and wounded and on its hands and knees; rather than being conceived in the snotty middle-class mind of a Harvard-graduated scriptwriter. The effort to put as little Hollywood gloss on the film as possible is admirable, and makes Lone Survivor look more like the gritty Hurt Locker than the flashy and over-dramatised Black Hawk Down.
In overwhelmingly large part, Lone Survivor is a true story and perhaps just one of many similar stories that will never be told. It is a fictionalised version of how real soldiers died in a widely-questioned war, which most certainly gives it plenty of intrigue, but equally places it on the edge of mainstream palatability.
The eponymous Lone Survivor - Marcus Luttrell - is played by Mark Wahlberg (Ted). Fortunately the film is very clearly not about his star quality, nor should it be. He plays his character with an understated modesty that is befitting considering the very serious nature of the film. This is made easier because the script is reasonably straightforward, even to the point of being noticeably ordinary. This reflects the evident desire of the director, Peter Berg (Hancock), for the film to feel like it crawled over to us from the most foreign, violent and incomprehensible desert of human experience bleeding and wounded and on its hands and knees; rather than being conceived in the snotty middle-class mind of a Harvard-graduated scriptwriter. The effort to put as little Hollywood gloss on the film as possible is admirable, and makes Lone Survivor look more like the gritty Hurt Locker than the flashy and over-dramatised Black Hawk Down.
With the clotted grime of the film allowed to stay clinging to it, there is very little space for visibility of the characters' development. Berg chooses instead to make this film almost purely about the brutal reality of the situation, not particularly about the people facing it. Overall, this is an error - we need to like characters or we won't care if they survive or not. Nonetheless, through its bruising focus on visual delivery, the film becomes fascinating and occasionally compelling, but also extremely unnerving. With the actors graphically taking bullets and shrapnel deep into flesh; and stuntmen quite falling down the sides of mountains in slow-motion onto bone-crushing rocks, this is a triple-x rated serving of hardcore war-nography. You will watch it knowing that what you are seeing is probably a horrifically accurate representation of what war is really like, but unless you are an (mildly sociopathic) enthusiast of war and violence or an American with a relatively specific (and mildly sociopathic) opinion of patriotism, you are likely to question what you are being asked to take from the film.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for mildly sociopathic behaviour - and as a mild sociopath myself, I enjoyed some parts of this movie. But even putting that aside, the whole thing is rather discomforting and eerily propagandist, particularly when the real-life images of all of the men who died in the film are languidly paraded in front of us at the end. This is not to take anything away from the fact that these men died, and that they faced a terrible end to their lives. But this is a job that these men chose, and that they are shown to have enjoyed; and lived for. It is a job that took them into a foreign country, with the object of killing other men. They were en route to kill other men when their targets turned on them and they instead found themselves on the receiving end. Regardless of your political opinion, it is surely a strange form of glorification to portray the drawn-out deaths of people who actively sought to kill others, with nothing particularly remarkable or noble about the characters other than that they lived for longer than most would in the circumstances, and that one of them managed not to die. The issues that took them to that harrowing end are not at all dealt with in this film and hang all too pungently and distractingly in the air around this film. It ruins any possibility that this film could be more meaningful than just a war-nographic war fest.
So don't go and see this film. Although it is amazingly real in how it looks, it is unfortunately amazingly vacant in how it will make you feel.
So don't go and see this film. Although it is amazingly real in how it looks, it is unfortunately amazingly vacant in how it will make you feel.
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