In 2005, a team of Navy Seals on a compromised mission was swarmed by Taliban forces, who ultimately killed all but one man.
That man’s eyewitness account was turned into the book Lone Survivor and now the feature film of the same name, directed by Peter Berg (Battleship, Friday Night Lights) and starring Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch and Ben Foster.
Berg lends his trademark kinetic directorial style to a film that is equal parts a gritty, tense actioner and a reverent tribute to the armed forces. Under siege, we watch our four heroes fight to survive with a minimalist trained precision that exhibits none of the customary bells and whistles that typically accompany Hollywood portrayals of war. It is as spartan as it is unrelenting, as the audience feels every piercing bullet, jagged rock and broken bone as the cast quite literally tumbles down the face of a mountain on the run from enemy fire (Berg fans will remember the director’s penchant for throwing his actors off cliffs from movies like The Rundown, a practice he has seemingly perfected to almost unbearably realistic-looking results).
The filmmaker’s respect and admiration for the military is apparent in every scene, from the opening credits backed with boot camp training footage, to the light-hearted barracks ribbing of a new recruit to the film’s epilogue, which passes through a slide-show tribute of the fallen men. Moral questions are raised about the rules of engagement and American superiority, but by-and-large Lone Survivor is a story about the horrors and heroics of modern warfare.
That singular vision works in the movie’s favor. Gone are the love triangles of Pearl Harbor, the volleyball games of Top Gun or the surfing of Apocalypse Now. Those scenes served the mission of those particular films, but the mission of Lone Survivor is simply to get home, or die trying.
Grade: B
*Lone Survivor opens in limited release on Dec. 25 and nationwide in January.
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