Lone Survivor (2013)

At the start of Ben Stiller’s terrific 2008 comedy Tropic Thunder, there is a lengthy sequence depicting the exact type of over-the-top war movie its characters are seeking to create. There is copious gore, the dialogue consists only of the usual military clichés shouted at top volume, and those who die happen to perish in the most cinematic and grandiose way possible. All of this, of course, was meant to poke fun at what most war films have become in the post-Saving Private Ryan era, and while watching Peter Berg’s Afghan War film Lone Survivor I found myself constantly thinking that this the exact type of movie Stiller was mocking. Berg has made a thundering, intense, flag-waving war film that is never boring but also frustratingly strains to create “big” moments. The genre doesn’t get much more emphatic than this, but it does get a whole lot better.

Lone Survivor is based on the true story of Operation Red Wings, which sent four US Navy SEALs into Afghanistant’s Kunar Province to kill or capture Taliban leader Ahmad Shah. Once the group arrives in the mountains, they lose communications with all other soldiers and discover that Shah is protected by dozens of Taliban soldiers. The four SEALs are Marcus Luttrell (Mark Wahlberg), Michael Murphy (Taylor Kitsch), Danny Dietz (Emile Hirsch) and Matthew Axelson (Ben Foster), and once they are discovered they must find a way to fight their way out and get back home. Once the shooting starts, it doesn’t let up until the credits roll.

After a few expository scenes in which our main group sits around the base waiting for the go-ahead, our protagonists are left to fend for themselves in the middle of Afghanistan. These scenes before the battle breaks out are among the best in the film, as the SEALs must try to navigate their way around the mountains without being detected. They are visitors in an unwelcome place, and Berg does a good job of depicting that specific sense of danger. It’s disappointing, then, that the film throws much of that elementalism away once things break bad. The first several minutes of constant shouting, shooting and bloodshed are appropriately effective, but after a while returns inevitably start to diminish. There are times when Berg flirts with a greater agenda, but it’s hard to tackle any ideas when all you’re doing is putting the audience through an endurance test. That is slightly appropriate, considering the opening credits sequence features real footage of SEALs in training, but from a filmmaking standpoint it all feels frustratingly shallow.

The film gets a fine chance to turn things around in home stretch, when one of the SEALs is forced to accept help from the very people he has previously seen as the enemy. Berg calms things down for a short while, and there is one great scene where the character lays powerless as others argue about what should become of him, but it’s only a few minutes until it all turns back into an overblown action movie. Every film based on a true story changes things to make it all more cinematic, but what Berg does in the finale of Lone Survivor exists just to fit a few more explosions in there. All the violence that came beforehand legitimately pushed the story along. By the end, this chaos starts to drift silly territory.

Even so, there is no doubt that the heart of Lone Survivor is in the right place, and the most emotionally affecting moments actually come during the end credits, at which point there are several photos and videos of the real SEALs from Red Wings. For those several minutes, Lone Survivor feels refreshingly human, and that only serves to expose just how disappointing the preceding film really was. The Omaha Beach sequences in Saving Private Ryan are fantastic, of course, but the beauty of that film was that the soldiers eventually had to move past the events of D-Day. Lone Survivor lingers on the violence for far too long, and anything substantive Berg has to say gets drowned out in the noise.

Grade: C