From the archive: "Lone Survivor"

The Zero Dark Thirty controversy has apparently done nothing to quell American cinema’s love affair with the country’s armed forces, but Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor is at least wholly committed in its love. Here, hardware, personnel and jargon are combined to give a punishing approximation of a real combat scenario; the film may stand as the most technically sophisticated game of soldier the movies have as yet set running before us.

What’s interesting is that this expensive kit has been put towards re-enacting a military failure: the 2005 reconnaissance mission that saw four Navy SEALs flown out to a village near the Afghan-Pakistan border to identify a Taliban leader, only – as flagged by that title – for one to return. One late image, of Mark Wahlberg picking shrapnel from his stricken, suppurating form, might be read as emblematic of America’s military pride after the misadventures in the Middle East; if this is meant as a recruiting film, it doesn’t always look so pretty.

The movie in the Berg filmography Lone Survivor most closely resembles, in fact, isn’t his previous Gulf incursion (2007’s The Kingdom) or the ludicrous Battleship, but 2005’s measured small-town football drama Friday Night Lights. Both films mark out, physically and atmospherically, the tight spots their characters find themselves in; the SEALs gain a few yards and identify their target, before being forced to retreat, scrambling between a rock and a hard place to rally whatever resources they have remaining.

Of course, making martyrs and heroes of fictional high-school footballers is an ideologically simpler business than doing the same for real-life servicemen, and there are points in Lone Survivor where you see corners being cut so that it might better play to multiplexes in the heartland. Berg is altogether selective in his subtitling of Pashtun, and it’s regrettable he chooses to crosscut so unambiguously between the SEALs being primed in the rules of engagement and their Taliban opposites taking machetes to civilians’ necks.

Still, even at its most questionable, the film manages to compel and grip you. Berg, a sometime Michael Mann protégé, is a gifted director of physical action, and – as on the football field – he knows how to make us feel what it is to take a hit, whether these troops are being strafed by gunfire, sent tumbling headfirst down a stony mountain, or – once it’s clear there’s no way back – obliged to jump off a promontory, in an image the film seriously intends to be as iconic as the Iwo Jima flagraising.

It’s started to seem as though our pricier movies are being programmed to function as simulation machines for sensation-hungry audiences: Lone Survivor’s middle act certainly doesn’t hold back when it comes to generating the fear, adrenalin and nausea that must come as standard with a military career, thereby allowing viewers to experience something of what their friends and loved ones shipped out for.

Whether or not it makes you want to sign up (to avenge these losses) or run a half-mile in the opposite direction will be a matter of personal sensibility, and maybe the one element here over which Berg holds comparatively little control. Yet Lone Survivor stands as a professionally mounted shrine to fallen brothers-in-arms – no matter that it hardly deigns to think too long or hard about why exactly they fell.

(MovieMail, January 2014)

Lone Survivor screens on Channel 4 tonight at 11.05pm.