Now I might be a man – actually scratch that. Now I might be an alpha male, no, scratch that again. I am an alpha male but call it what you will I have had my full of all those macho ‘Saving Private Ryan’ type flicks. The sort where everyone just dies in front of you and the director just relishes putting you in the thick heart of brutal battle. It is little wonder then that I was more than a little pessimistic about this film; let’s face it the title says it all.
However this Peter Berg film; director of blockbuster movie Battleship, in which the US Navy drove off an alien invasion opened with a much different kind of flavour than I was used to. Lone Survivor, opens by focussing on the inner endurance battles of these men as they go through training and the bonding they forge as a team, a brotherhood. In the opening montage we see them taught to handle pain, inhospitable conditions (sometimes naked), what’s more we see many people quit. It comes across as an insatiable drive to reconnect the audience with reality. It is this understanding and a mixture of top class acting and proficient story-telling that makes this film different to the run of the mill films we have seen.
It is little wonder actually, the film’s plot comes from the real life account of Marcus Luttrell, a former US Navy SEAL, and describes an operation in the mountains of Afghanistan in 2005, in which four American soldiers found themselves caught on the prongs of a moral dilemma.
Sent to assassinate a Taliban warlord, they unexpectedly encounter three goat herds; an elderly man, a young boy and a scowling teenager. They have three choices, each one with its own type of consequence. They can kill them, tie them up or let them go. After a lengthy discussion about the ethics and morals as well as what could happen to them they decide they are not animals and decide on the latter and that is where things go wrong.
The Taliban are as merciless as you would expect, and in as many ways as some may argue we are led to believe but what they don’t lack is in numbers and resources.
Where this film really succeeds is bringing the reality and the injustice of war to your eyes. The Marines, played by Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch and Ben Foster carry the film well and although the film becomes very frantic it remains coherent in its set up; we know who the men are, who’s married, who has kids and what each man stands to lose. I thought it was very brave too that the soldiers were not portrayed as superheroes. In one scene, cornered by the enemy they decide to fling themselves down a cliff to escape and we see their bodies smashed and ground by both rocks and bullets. It was very unnerving to see such a common scene shown for the reality it is.
The film doesn’t let up even at the last chapter and although some scenes are clichéd, based on the reality it is founded upon is something you can forgive. There are some real touching scenes there too which are executed very well.
So, how does one rate this film, do you rate it on the entertainment, the quality of the action and acting? do you rate the reality or just the horror of it? I guess I will praise it for the account it portrays about the men and women who put themselves in the position where such an account could be wrote. As a film it is not exceptional and is far from stylish, but I don’t think it was meant to be. However, the story it tells is certainly worthy.