Some true stories, when we hear them, seem so dramatic, so improbable, so deviously yet accidentally perfect that they elicit the comment, “Someone should make a movie of that.” The trouble then is, when such stories are not simply filmed and retold but entirely refashioned according to the laws of popular filmmaking. Peter Berg can be a competent director of fun flicks, like Hancock (2008) and, just last year, the self-satirising, quite hilarious megabudget meltdown Battleship. When he has pretensions to cleverness or depth, however, the results can be abysmal, like his debut film, the black comedy Very Bad Things (1998) which set out to satirise the blithe lack of responsibility and moral intelligence in the insulated classes but lacked any sense of control or real irony. Lone Survivor recalls his debut in its absence of mediating acumen to even slightly retard the flow of asinine effects. An opening montage depicting the fascistic training of US Navy SEALs, followed quickly by images of hot young stars running shirtless across the desert quickly establishes this based-on-truth farrago as soft-core, super-macho war porn that posits US military action in Afghanistan somewhere between 300 (2006) and an Ultimate Football collectible poster. Lone Survivor is a fascinatingly contradictory work: it’s as beholden to an overt fetishism of American masculine power and rectitude, and yet depicts a real and tragic story about failure in war (which, indeed, all good hero worship cults in the classical world tended to be, from Achilles to Roland). The true story of Operation Red Wings is well worth telling, a sad, thrilling, absurd exposition of everything that can go wrong in modern war, but for Berg it’s something like The Hunger Games with buff dudes in army fatigues.
Marcus Luttrell (Mark Wahlberg), Mike Murphy (Taylor Kitsch), Matthew Axelson (Ben Foster), and Danny Deitz (Emile Hirsch) are SEALs dispatched to the back of beyond in Afghanistan: the casting suggests an effort to make it moot which one of these actors will be the eponymous lone survivor, although it’s an even bet the co-producer will make it. Berg plays a truly lousy game by introducing the film with Wahlberg being rushed onto the operating table, only for his heartbeat to stop registering: two hours later when Berg returns to this scene, we get the revival. Murphy is the legendary soldier’s soldier, Luttrell the doggedly competent one, Axelson the hirsute Zen warrior with the blowtorch eyes, and Deitz the edgy one who cracks up a little. The team is deployed to find and kill Ahmad Shah, a regional warlord (who would eventually meet his end fighting Pakistani police in 2007). Expecting to hit Shah when holed up with a few guards, they instead find him encamped with a small army, and the team soon encounters a goatherd and his sons who present an ethical dilemma. Here, the film briefly becomes interesting, as the soldiers discuss, with urgent, toey, but still effective pro-and-con reasoning about whether they should kill the prisoners and continue with their mission: Luttrell argues with cutting force that he doesn’t want to end up as a villain on CNN. The tone here calls back to Very Bad Things in suggesting Berg wishes to sustain his interest in men in groups contending with their worst impulses in the name of self-protection.
This morally complex element is quickly thrown by the wayside as Murphy pulls the plug on the mission, resolving to release the prisoners and hike to the top of neighbouring Sawtalo Sar mountain to radio for evac. But things quickly go SNAFU: one of the goatherd’s sons dashes to alert the Taliban, radio contact proves frustratingly elusive, the Apache helicopters assigned to protect the rescue choppers have been pulled for another assignment, and the team soon find themselves in the midst of a running gunfight. Lone Survivor cries for a filmmaker with a feel for the relationship of the individual to the landscape and a gift for communicating physical and psychological extremes, such as Werner Herzog displayed in his under-regarded Rescue Dawn (2006) or Kathryn Bigelow accomplished in The Hurt Locker (2009), or the capacity to hit generic marks whilst developing eccentric understanding and specifically terrible beauty found in the best older war movie artisans, like Sam Fuller, Don Siegel, or Robert Aldrich. Berg merely proceeds with the cloddish assumption that he can direct this material like a perfectly ordinary action flick, elongating the middle act shoot-out to an eternity, grinding up spatial relationships with his cut-happy filming, and stretching out each American’s death to operatic degrees after they’ve gunned down a dozen Afghanis each, in a fashion that recalls John Wayne’s The Alamo (1960). Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968) is also invoked, in the way it reduces what everyone knows to be the nettled military and political situation to the simplest good guys vs. bad guys cheese. The model here is Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (2001) in constructing a breathlessly intense theme-park ride based on fact, but it avoids that film’s confused attempts at turning its core situation into a whirlwind of elemental survivalism, and its tone of elegiac sadness in comprehending so much loss for so little result. The closer recent antecedent is Randall Wallace’s We Were Soldiers (2002), with its major hard-on for patriotic gore and broad, clunky dramatics.
Early scenes are particularly bad. Murphy and Deitz are introduced racing each-other with the dawn light glittering on their torsos, blasting it to the extreme for freedom, y’all. One solider messages his wife with endearing missives like telling her she’s “sweet as pie, boo,” whilst a neophyte is inducted into the warrior ranks by a forced dance performance. Anyone who’s seen that great video of real soldiers recreating Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” clip will spot the probable inspiration here, although the model has a trillion times more humour value and self-mocking, heroic kick. The only major difference in dramatic style between this and a second-rate ‘50s B war movie is the dialogue patterns: the old grunt speak has given way to that zingy, pop-accented style here recognisable from every other movie these days, but the soldiers fail to emerge with anything but the vaguest individuality. Only Hirsch’s performance stands out, because he at least pushes his character’s stress-frayed wits to the fore, but he pays the price in seeming rather overripe in context. The film’s central, extended spectacle of violence and loss, as the four-man team is whittled down to one, is gruelling, but never feels quite as intense or gripping as it should, because Berg has little gift for depicting warfare realistically, and he pumps up the indefatigable nature of his soldiers to a degree that borders on camp. Camera set-ups that suggest nascent poetry, like the sight of bullet-riddled Kitsch on a prow of mountain rock, perched between worlds in a private space of coming to terms with death after an heroic act, are smothered by blunt-force effects, as Berg can’t resist offering a point-of-view shot of a gun held on Kitsch by a looming executioner, to ram home the fact that these men aren’t just falling in combat but are being actively wiped out by swarthy buggers. Berg stages an impressive sequence, as the SEALs tumble down a mountainside, every jarring blow on stone and tree depicted in intimate detail by Tobias Schliessler’s camera, but Berg likes it so much that he does it again. When one of the rescue choppers is shot down (the most infamous incident during the ill-fated operation), the effects tilt perilously close to computer gaming. Berg’s best touch is a recurring one, where a steadicam follows Wahlberg as he constantly glances over his shoulder in caution and anxiety, and then later with horror and fear, the camera filling in for the mortality nipping at his heels.
To make sure we know what the stakes are, Berg gives us a glimpse early on of Shah’s militia, led by improbably beautiful Taliban thug Taraq (Sammy Sheik) who becomes the default antagonist, flashing mascaraed eyes and wildly threatening fellow Afghans with all the subtlety of a pantomime villain. Good and bad Afghanis are delineated by how much they frown. What should have been the most interesting and stirring element of the story, when Luttrell is found and aided by a village of anti-Taliban Afghans, thus introducing us to the lay of the divided land and the curious values of the people whose freedom is supposedly being fought for, is reduced to a cursory action finale as good Afghan guy Gulab (Ali Suliman) faces down evil Afghan guy whilst Luttrell is helped to fight off the enemy by a cute kid. Revealingly, Berg never bothers to subtitle the Afghans until they’re arguing over Marky Mark’s fate. Some would undoubtedly argue that Lone Survivor avoids ideology in preference for immersive realism and mere admiration for the grit of these guys. But truth be told, every inch of the film is drenched in dull-witted chauvinism and facile truthfulness. Perhaps its biggest impact on me, indeed, was to make me question, as a whole, a fascinating and increasingly common phenomenon in modern film (one that preceded it, clearly, in modern publishing): the insistence on ripped-from-the-headlines veracity, an aspect that is used not to investigate events more deeply but to gain plaudits without having to dig deeply at all.
Bigelow got in some hot water for Zero Dark Thirty’s detached perspective on War on Terror exigencies before its release. Whilst that controversy was overblown, it did stem from the problem of this true-life parasitism, which is too often used as its own defence, a warding off of real questions and informed perspectives whilst annexing immediate problems for borrowed gravitas. The impressive but similarly, faux-detached Captain Phillips evokes the same problem, able to skip around the ethical problems by presenting the anecdote as if saying to the audience, “pretend this is you – what would you do?” Lone Survivor is greatly inferior to either of those films, much less abashed in cloaking its shallow filmmaking and audience manipulation in the flag of authenticity. Lone Survivor culminates in a rah-rah race of the cavalry coming to the rescue as Luttrell’s Afghani protector is dragged out to have an arm hacked off in scenes that could have been clipped out of that paragon of docu-drama realism, Rambo III (1989). Whereas a filmmaker like Fuller, who had been in war and knew what it was about, would have invented a tale to bear the weight of his insight into it, Berg both exploits and hides behind the niceties of such a story, reducing real people to shallow placards and their situation to hooray-for-us schlock. The actors aren’t well-served by their dialogue or the stick-thin characterisations. Eric Bana, light years from his early satirical comedy work, makes semi-random, glowering appearances as the SEAL commander Erik Kristensen, who makes an ill-fated attempt to rescue them. Berg has the gall to wrap up the film with a lengthy sequence showing the real avatars for the protagonists, actual, brave people who fought and died so Berg could lend his tacky little Oscar bait war film the patina of true grit.
