A Lone Survivor
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Playing Nationwide
A Lone Survivor is based on the book of the same name by Marcus Luttrell (who is played here by Mark Wahlberg), which tells the true story of an abortive Navy SEALs operation against the Taleban in Afghanistan in 2005.
Although based on real situations in a real war, the actual nod towards back-story in the film itself is so token and clunky that I attempted to exchange it for goods and services as part of a promotional offer.
It would be easy and tempting to dismiss this as meaningless pro-war propaganda. But that would be flattering it: there’s literally no argument in here either way; it doesn’t bother to give any significant reason why these soldiers are there, slowly being shot to death at a strange mountainside.
The unremitting, quickly-banal violence leaves little room for tension or plot development.This is a shame because Lone Survivor is set in a war full of nuance and talking points and moral dilemma. But this film could be any action film. Worse, it could be a solitary battle scene taken from any film, eked out to two hours.
The characters’ dialogue is a series of hackneyed quips and grave platitudes. The depressing thing is that you suspect that this might actually not be so far away from how it actually was: soldiers playing a role they’ve seen depicted in films countless times before, earnestly, unthinkingly embracing their assigned role as ‘American heroes’.
Even an entertainingly mindless flick can offer a brief bout of escapism that bumps it up a few notches in the watchability stakes, but Lone Survivor is too violent and unrelenting to be enjoyable, yet too devoid of personality, character or self-awareness to let the uncontextualised bloodshed be satisfactory on a ‘gritty realism’ kind of level.
If you see this film, you might feel a bit unsettled – the intensity of the fighting is certainly gruelling – but it’d be better for everyone if you didn’t.
Just like it would be better for everyone if the events depicted in the film had never happened (even discounting the politics), just to spare the world this ugly, sickly film.
