Peter Berg is an interesting director. One might be tempted to dismiss him as a technically adept but workman director, with a lineup like The Rundown or Hancock. However, most of his movies, though not necessarily great, seem to have a bit of a spark to them. A bit of a heart, seemingly a desire to transcend the banality of the material and tell a tale that has a human connect. That he is not a Peter Hyams or a Brett Ratner. That he is "better than this".
And you know what? I'm inclined to agree. Even Battleship, a movie that the world most definitely did not need, somehow, he managed to inject a little heart, humor and even suspense into the film to make it a pulpy scifi love letter to American servicemembers and classic warships.
Even then, even with his technical skill and obvious affection for those who serve in uniform, it is hard to picture him directing a serious war movie that tries to capture the reality of aspects of war. Doubly, a scenario in which our guys lost. But after he finished Battleship, that is exactly the project he embarked on, to adapt the book Lone Survivor, an account by Marcus Luttrel, a Navy SEAL who was the lone survivor of a recon team out in advance of Operation Red Wing, an attempt to apprehend Taliban leader Ahmad Shah, who was responsible for the deaths of twenty Marines as well as many allied Afghans, as well as other Taliban leaders.
Filming in mountains in New Mexico standing in for the Hindi Kush mountain region in Afghanistan, we are shown bits of the SEAL unit interacting with each other at their Forward Operating Base, both at work and at play. It isn't overplayed or underplayed (some critics have said more effort could have been given to characterization, but in my opinion, the film managed to do just enough to establish who these people are and why they do what they do, both with the scenes in Afghanistan as well as the opening scenes showing sailors going through SEAL training school).
The focus of the film would be the recon element sent out in advance of Operation Red Wing, to confirm the location of Shah and the other targets and to conduct on site reconnaissance, to gain fresh real time intelligence for the main force follow on. They land without a hitch and establish an observation point. Trouble starts immediately, though, with communications proving difficult due to the terrain conditions in Afghanistan. Things really get out of hand, though, when a shepherd and two Afghan boys stumble across them. The team has to make a decision what to do with them. They decide to let them go, hightail it out of there and call off the mission. However, they are eventually run down by a large Taliban force and are slowly ground down in a grueling firefight, in which Mark Luttrell (Mark Wahlberg) is the only survivor.
This is a film that pulls no punches in its depiction of the torment the SEALs go through. It is amazing what they do to try to evade their pursuers, including jumping off TWO cliffs to try to avoid them. Just as amazing, is how fast the Afghans pursue, carrying heavy weapons, too. Also, the Afghan natives that assist Luttrell show another side to this, directed by their tribal honor code as well as their hatred of the Taliban. The Taliban are depicted pretty much as their actions have indicated in reality, a bunch of fundamentalist thugs.
This movie is not about anything too deep. Not a meditation about the whys of war. It is not a deep examination of the ties that bond warriors. It is really about one really bad day that happens to some good men.
One of them lived to tell the tale.
I for one am glad, for it is a worthy tale to be told.
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