★★☆☆☆
The marketing campaign behind The Lone Survivor has been a clever one, courting Academy judges by posturing as an intimate film which interrogates the masculine bonds formed on a battlefield. However, in vying so ostentatiously “for your consideration” and selling itself as a ‘personal’ war-movie (in the vein of Kathryn Bigelow’s 2008 success The Hurt Locker) Peter Berg’s passion project about the four-man reconnaissance team who dramatically failed in their quest to track Taliban leader Ahmad Shah is exposed all the more conspicuously as a generic action movie. The movie isn’t merely mediocre, but actively disappointing.
The overall deflating experience was only heightened by the fact the movie gets off to such a promising start. The opening credits sequence is a ‘real-footage’ montage, containing clips which communicate the pain-staking pressures of American warfare – a hyperactive and claustrophobic assault of noises and images which is compellingly undercut by the first fifteen minutes of film, where the landscapes and narratives are introduced with a fly-off-the-wall kind of restraint. It’s thoughtfully executed, and it’s hard to believe that we are watching the work of the director behind Hancock and Battleship – a.k.a ‘Transformers with Rihanna’.
My mind was cast back to 2012’s End of Watch in that the narrative explores the moral dilemmas of individuals who are working within the parameters of violent institutions; Lone Survivor’s outstanding set-piece comes around the half hour mark, when the secret reconnaissance of the four soldiers is unwittingly discovered by an Afghan goatherd and two young boys who are held hostage. What follows is a brutal ethical argument, brilliantly performed by the lead cast-members, as they discuss whether to release the hostages and abort the mission, or to ‘terminate the compromise’, and kill the civilians. Where End of Watch was able to sustain this dynamic of personal agency, Lone Survivor’s script takes a drastic turn for the worse, becoming the most careless of action adventures.
Suddenly we reach the movie’s central set-piece, the four Americans defending themselves from an onslaught of Taliban soldiers, and I feel like I’m watching my house-mate play a game of Call of Duty; my eyes are mind-numbingly glued to the screen but my brain has switched off. While there is an impressive physicality to the conflict – bullets tear through flesh and bodies smack on to rocks with visceral force – the characters become rapidly depersonalised. As the action goes on, seemingly endlessly, the script begins to treat the soldiers less as people and more as weapons – underpinning the very military coldness that the story should surely be reacting against. It is evidence of Berg’s failure as a story-teller that we begin to care more for the strategy of their battle than we do for the psychological struggle they presumably experienced.
While half-hearted attempts are made at nostalgic speeches to uphold the pretence of ‘human drama’, Mark Wahlberg (a highly competent actor) is ultimately transformed from a man grappling with the responsibilities of leadership into a typical Hollywood action-hero, and the corresponding patriotism of ‘American man’ Vs. ‘hoards of faceless Afghan soldiers seemingly incapable of firing guns’ leaves a bitter taste in one’s mouth. The work becomes manipulative and the movie’s initial understated tone now gives way to a righteous display of how muscular men are driven to survive which borders on self-parody.
By the half-way mark, one begins to realise that The Lone Survivor is all over the place, marred by a generic and thematic inconsistency which is alienating. At one moment it is a personal drama, the next a nationalistic action-adventure and, in the movie’s positively ludicrous (and entirely fabricated) third act, a half-baked ‘issue’ documentary. If it wasn’t for absolutely stellar sound design, the whole movie would play out like a ‘first-draft’, a rough cut – most noticeably where the story of a certain young recruit is developed only to be abruptly side-lined.
Because Berg fails to extract a narrative coherency out of an unwieldy script, The Lone Survivor is never quite sure how it wants to play to an audience – resulting in a disappointment which wastes a capable cast.
