You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
Lone Survivor.
Wow.
That’s all I can say as the film goes dark, the lights go on and I stand to exit the theater.
“Wow”
There is a smattering of applause, but the feeling in the theater is mostly that of emotion.
The audience is spent, worn out.
I think we all need a break from this emotionally draining experience that we have paid to endure.
I hear the woman to the left of me sniffling. She has been crying for the last 20 minutes.
The man next to me simply says “incredible.”
As I start the slow zombie shuffle down the stairs, I feel my eyes welling with tears.
I feel pain in my heart, a heaviness in my soul.
“That was amazing,” I say to my friend as we slowly exit the stunned theater.
In a weird way, I feel like I have been to war. I feel like I too suffered the atrocities and horrors of the Seals.
I am saddened by what I have just seen. I am deeply appreciative of the sacrifice I have just witnessed. I am amazed by the film making, a war film that transcends cinema.
The story Lone Survivor is quite honestly the best film I have seen in forever.
It is a film based on the novel and a true story. It is written by and focuses on an American hero that few Americans have ever heard of.
The story takes place in 2005 in the rugged hills of Afghanistan.
The special unit’s task is to neutralize a Taliban leader.
Five days later, only one of those Navy SEALS makes it out alive. He is broken like a glass stomped at a Jewish Wedding. He is bleeding like a slaughter house from every limb. He is dead where he stands, though his heart continues to beat.
This is the story of the only survivor of Operation Redwing, SEAL fire team leader Marcus Luttrell, and the extraordinary firefight that led to the largest loss of life in American Navy SEAL history.
There have been many compelling films made about war.
Saving Private Ryan. Apocalypse Now. Platoon.
Add Lone Survivor to the list.
In today’s movie universe, excess is the norm. CGI and explosions are expected like vomit on MTV’s Jersey Shore.
Lone Survivor has its share, but when it could go all in like a bloody game of Texas Hold Em, Lone Survivor bares its soul.
The musical score is silence.
Fast edits are replaced by a slow motion heart beat.
A barrage of gunfire rips into a man.
All we see is a close up of a Seal’s eye as his life is extinguished.
It’s a powerful, quiet moment.
There is no musical accompaniment. There is no rat a tat of sniper fire.
It’s just a slow motion exit of breath as the man’s spirit passes from this world to the next.
The film is directed by Peter Berg.
He deserves an Oscar if not an honorary purple heart.
He finds compelling natural sound in pensive breathing, the crunch of a shoe on a slippery rock, the trickle of a bead of sweat down a forehead.
The theater was so quiet, I could hear the pursive man next to me stridently breathing for most of the film.
The theater was so quiet, so intense, I was afraid to make a sound.
It’s as if the audience didn’t want to alert the Taliban where we were either.
I was so nervous, my shoulder was numb i was squeezing my arm rest so tightly.
I found myself wanting the tension to subside.
The intensity was piercing, like walking through a darkened corridor full of razor blades.
And when the theater got loud, it got loud in an unyielding, terrifying way.
Gunfire and explosions and screams of anguish.
At times it was relentless.
The Seals are outnumbered and out gunned. They fight valiantly but they have no option but to retreat.
Unfortunately they are on a mountain and retreat literally means falling off a cliff.
The sound of flesh hitting logs, and bones being broken on rocks is upsetting.
The sound is concussive. The visuals disturbing.
These scenes are moving, memorable, troubling.
It reminds me of the opening salvo in Saving Private Ryan when the men leave the troop carriers and the sea turns red with blood.
I walk out of the theater trying to clear the lump in my throat.
I am still emotionally caught up in a real event that happened almost 10 years ago.
But it is so startling, so real, it makes me want to hug a soldier, kiss a flag, salute a Seal, to let them know how much we appreciate their sacrifice and bravery.
They give their lives on an anonymous hill in a country many of us couldn’t find on a map.
This film is chilling in its violence, deliberate in its ability to deliver courage and make us feel when the world overwhelms us with numbness.
But I’m just one man.
I just read a review that gives this film a C-, and it calls it an anti-war propaganda film.
The continuous gruesome images of the terrors of war, the horrific training that the soldiers are put through, and no real motivation behind going after the Taliban all add up pretty quickly. It seems as though writer/director Peter Berg wants us to side with him and say that we should not be fighting in wars and that we should not even be treating soldiers in the way that we do in training. There’s nothing wrong with having an opinion like that, but forcing it on us in a story of real heroes that lost their lives seems like the wrong time.
I couldn’t disagree more.
But the beauty of these two polarizing points of view is that we get to have polarizing points of view.
And we get to have these discussions thanks to super hero warriors of freedom like the men of Seal team 10 who died on that anonymous mountain so long ago.
Life’s Crazy™