Four Navy SEALs head into the mountains of Afghanistan on a secret mission in LONE SURVIVOR
LONE SURVIVOR (Peter Berg, 2013)
Opens Wednesday, December 25
www.lonesurvivorfilm.com
In the summer of 2005, four navy SEALs went deep into the mountains of Afghanistan to assassinate a Taliban leader responsible for the recent death of twenty marines. Writer-director Peter Berg tells the story of Operation Red Wings and the remarkably brave quartet in Lone Survivor, an ultraviolent action thriller that very well could be used as a training and propaganda film for the next generation of super-soldiers. Close-knit navy SEALs Marcus Luttrell (Mark Wahlberg), Michael P. Murphy (Taylor Kitsch), Danny Dietz (Emile Hirsch), and Matthew Axelson (Ben Foster) are lying in wait for Ahmad Shah (Yousuf Azami) when they are discovered by a trio of goatherders. Forced to decide between letting the possibly innocent men go or killing them so the mission can continue, they choose the former and start to leave the area, but they soon find themselves in the midst of a bloody firefight, one of the most brutal ever depicted on film. Ultimately, only one of them is left, and Lt. Commander Erik S. Kristensen (Eric Bana) and the rest of the team are ready to go in and try to bring him home alive. Berg, who made the exciting Saudi Arabia-set al-Qaeda thriller The Kingdom and the ridiculous Battleship, shows little trust in the story by employing an opening scene that takes away much of the film’s suspense. Instead, it becomes a jingoistic portrait of a mission that has gone terribly wrong and keeps getting worse as the military attempts to rescue the heroic lone survivor. Berg, who based the film on a book by Luttrell that has had some of its details questioned, also adds an overly emotional and manipulative coda that pulls at the heartstrings in a way the narrative itself was unable to. The men of Operation Red Wings are all heroes — their loyalty and dedication is awe-inspiring, especially as bullets rain down on them — but this film does not do them proper justice, which is a shame.