“Lone Survivor,” written and directed by Peter Berg, is based on the 2007 book, “Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of Seal Team 10,” Marcus Luttrell’s account of the doomed mission Operation Red Wings, as told to novelist Patrick Robinson.
In June, 2005, four Navy SEALs embarked on a mission to capture or kill Taliban leader Ahmad Shah in a village deep within the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan. The mission went horribly wrong, Luttrell was the only survivor. Sixteen more Americans would die in the rescue attempt when the Chinook helicopter they were riding in was shot down.
The movie starts with archive footage of Navy SEAL training. Men are immersed in the cold sea shivering, exhausted beyond the limits of endurance while relief is just steps away. Ring a bell three times and put your helmet on the ground beneath it. The line of helmets grows longer, but a few endure to become SEALs.
Cut to Afghanistan and scenes of the daily life of elite troops in between missions. Men email home, joke, plan a wedding and haze newbies.
Then the briefing for the mission, identification of the target, and insertion into the mountains by helicopter.
The team: Lieutenant Michael P. “Murph” Murphy (Taylor Kitsch), team leader; Hospital Corpsman First Class Marcus Luttrell (Mark Wahlberg), medic and sniper; Gunner’s Mate 2nd Class Danny Dietz (Emile Hirsch), radio operator; Sonar Technician (Surface) 2nd Class Matthew “Axe” Axelson (Ben Foster), sniper.
The team reach a point in the mountains above the village and find out there are more Taliban than expected. Then an old man and two teenage boys herding goats stumble upon them.
The team realize there are only three alternatives for them, and two of them amount to killing the three Afghans. They elect to release them and abort the mission. The movie doesn’t attempt to sugarcoat the decision. It’s not only humanity, but fear of the consequences of violating the military’s rules of engagement.
The team attempts to retreat to high ground and radio for extraction, but quickly find communications equipment unreliable in the mountains. Worse, they find a deep ravine between them and the peak. Worst, within an hour the Taliban is on them.
After action reports, citations for the Navy Crosses awarded, and investigation by skeptical journalists arrive at different figures for the number of Taliban. Suffice it to say, there were more Taliban than SEALs on the mountain, and they were more heavily armed.
The rest of the film is an agonizing portrayal of the team making a fighting retreat, falling down the mountain and being shot to pieces.
Luttrell arrives alone at a water hole where he is found by Afghan villagers who persuade him with some difficulty to trust them, take him in, shelter him and protect him from the Taliban until help arrives.
To this day Mohammad Gulab (Ali Suliman) the Afghan who found and sheltered him according to the tribal code of Pushtunwali and Luttrell are fast friends. Gulab was brought to America to see the premier of “Lone Survivor.”
Berg put in a lot of work to make this movie as real as possible, and it shows, both on the screen and the unusual silence of the audience.
Luttrell moved in with Berg for a while to work on the script. Berg himself became the first civilian to embed with a SEAL team in Iraq and interviewed families of the dead SEALs.
Berg took the minimum salary allowed under Directors Guild of America rules and convinced a lot of the cast to lower their asking price to keep production costs down. Making this film meant a lot to a lot of people.
It’s doing well at the box office and has generally been a critical success.
But it’s also been called violence porn and light on character development,
Kyle Smith of the New York Times called it “a movie about an irrelevant skirmish that ended in near-total catastrophe, during a war we are not winning.”
Amy Nicholson of LA Weekly, evidently didn’t bother to stay till the end and distilled the message to “Brown people bad, American people good.”
No it’s violence, portrayed accurately. “Violence porn” is Hollywood sanitized violence where people shot just drop and go to sleep.
No, it’s an action driven movie where character is shown by how men act under extreme stress.
Yes, it ended in near-total catastrophe and we are not winning the war. Does it follow we have nothing to learn from why military operations end catastrophically in the Hindu Kush, “the graveyard of empires”?
Whatever you think of the war, the Taliban murder women who dress “immodestly” and shoot little girls in the head who want to go to school. The SEALs are the good guys. Enjoy the movie.
Note: This was published in the print-only TV Guide of the Marshall Independent.