“Lone Survivor” is based on Marcus Luttrell’s homonymous non-fiction novel in which he detailed the events of the failed Operation Red Wings mission undertaken by Navy SEALs during the Afghanistan invasion on June 2005. The purpose of the mission was to capture or kill Taliban leader Ahmad Shah who was supposed to be in hiding somewhere near the slopes of Sawtalo Sar. Mark Wahlberg plays Luttrell, the team leader who takes three other soldiers (played by Taylor Kitsch, Ben Foster and Emile Hirsch) with him in what was supposed to be a relatively simple mission; however communication problems and a series of highly unfortunate events force these men to battle Shah’s entire gang without any backups.
Director Peter Berg focuses most of his film on the central battle in which the men get shot, fall off cliffs, break bones and have the flesh torn off their bodies. They are horrifying scenes in which we see how strong the human body can be under the most inhuman circumstances. These scenes are shot with an immense attention to detail, some might even say they are a bit sensationalist, but only because Berg doesn’t merely show us the horrors of battle, he also decides to turn these men into the ultimate kinds of martyrs shooting their deaths in slow motion, giving them bodies that can receive as many wound shots as any “Die Hard” villain and suggesting that their lives are worthier than those of the people they are battling.
It’s true that a soldier’s duty must be kept and going into a debate over whether the Afghanistan war was idiotic or not, seems more often than not to be a moot point, but must the movies keep trying to romanticize the senseless loss of young lives? “Lone Survivor” is the kind of propagandistic film that would’ve been made during WWII, only back then it would’ve clicked with people because they understood the enemy at large was a true world menace. “Lone Survivor” shows us these soldiers being terrified of shepherds, some of whom eventually give shelter to Luttrell, but whether it’s done consciously or not, it highlights the fact that not even these people know what they’re fighting for or who are they supposed to be fighting against.
By the time the film reaches its tear filled finale in which of course we are presented with pictures of the real life people involved in the mission, it has become obvious that “Lone Survivor” is nothing if not a two hour long ad for the Navy SEALs, one which sadly lacks any urgency and certainly doesn’t know who it’s being made for.
