Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
WAR is still HELL
Wrenching war thriller ‘The Outpost’ leaves audience weeping
In 1986, I went to a preview screening of Oliver Stone’s “Platoon” held for veterans of the Vietnam War.
I was planning to interview some of them after the screening for a newspaper column I was writing; I would note their reactions and ask a few questions about how the cinematic experience jibed with their memories.
My job was not to review the movie but to report how the vets reviewed it. I was not naive about the way men who’d been in combat typically dismissed war movies; I’d seen how my father and his colleagues had scoffed at John Wayne’s “The Green Berets.”
I sat in the back of the half-full theater as the movie played. One or two vets walked out during a combat scene, but most of them sat through past the end, waiting for the credits to roll. Then they remained there for long and wordless beat before, as if on some signal, they stood and began to file
toward the lobby where I waited in ambush.
As they emerged, some in decorated green vests and hats announcing the particulars of their service, I noticed many of them had been crying. Some kept walking, raising a gentle hand in my direction when I artlessly asked what they thought of the movie, but I found a few who would talk. I gathered some quotes, a half dozen vets repeating some version of: “That’s how it was.”
People cry at movies all the time because it feels good to let loose of what we hold inside. Usually what we’re holding inside is some sloppy species of self-pity, and it might be good to allow “The Notebook” or “Steel Magnolias” to drain it off.
But “Platoon” supplied these veterans with a deeper catharsis; it told their story as they would have it told. That the director had been one of them was not lost on these old soldiers, they sensed the authenticity of his experience and his respect for theirs in every frame.
Movie-making has advanced quite a bit technologically in the past 34 years, but not much is gained through the digital manipulation of pixels on a micro level. A filmmaker is an artist, not a technician. Whether things look real matters a lot less than whether things feel true.
There is an immersive verisimilitude to Rod Lurie’s “The Outpost,” a wrenching war thriller that has absorbed the lessons of documentaries like Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington’s “Restrepo” as well as Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” and Stone’s “Platoon,” which it resembles less in form than in effect.
I didn’t watch “The Outpost” with a group of combat veterans in a theater. I watched it on an iPad (knowing that detail might wound Lurie a little) in my office. But it feels like a movie made for people who understand what it is like to subordinate one’s own judgment to authority, and to accept seemingly impossible, seeming futile missions because they were handed down from on high. It’s not a soldier’s place to wonder why …
Army Combat Outpost Keating was a remote outpost in the Hindu Kush, at the foot of three steep mountains in eastern Afghanistan 14 miles from the Pakistan border. On Oct. 9, 2009, a force of more than 400 Taliban fighters attempted to overrun Bravo Troop 3rd Squadron, 61st Cavalry Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division, a group of 53 American soldiers stationed there. After a 12-hour firefight, eight Americans were dead and 27 more were wounded. And about 150 Taliban fighters were killed.
Bravo Troop became one of the most decorated units in the Afghanistan war, with two living service members receiving the Medal of Honor from the same battle for the first time in 50 years.
Though they held off the Taliban, they withdrew from the outpost shortly afterward, in accordance with Coalition Commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s strategy of ceding to remote outposts to the enemy and consolidating troops in more populated urban areas. So Bravo Troop was defending an outpost the Coalition really didn’t want, a scenario straight out of Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” which itself drew from the author’s experiences as a bombardier during World War II.
While “The Outpost” is based on CNN anchor Jake Tapper’s best-selling 2012 book of the same title, which exhaustively examined the forces that brought the soldiers to their nearly indefensible hemmed-in position and the fallout from the battle, Lurie wisely focuses on the men of Bravo Troop. He introduces them in classic movie style, with the arrival of three newcomers; as one of them finds his bunk, he notices the words “It doesn’t get better” carved into a piece of nearby timber.
We’re dropped into their daily routine, the banal and boring banter of keyed-up young men that can quickly cycle through coarse teasing, resentment and flaring hostility, as they wait for the inevitable attack. Some might consider it a problem that — given the fog and noise of battle and their close-shaved haircuts — it’s sometimes difficult to tell the individual soldiers apart, but we might accept their interchangeability as the point.
Orlando Bloom plays base commander Capt. Ben Keating, Scott Eastwood plays Staff Sgt. Clint Romesha, one of the Medal of Honor winners, while the always watchable Caleb Landry Jones plays Sgt. Ty Carter, the other Medal of Honor winner. (Milo Gibson, son of Mel, shows up as one of the company.)
Additionally, Lurie cast four real-life survivors of the Battle of Kamdesh, probably as much to honor them for their service as to contribute to the verisimilitude.
While the first half of the film is technically impressive, with Lurie’s camera snaking through the claustrophobic quarters of the camp, catching some of the desperation in the men’s macho bravado, the laconic dialogue, while naturalistic, feels flat and forced, like a party that’s running out of steam.
But then, the full-throated horror of war breaks in.
Lurie, a 1984 graduate of West Point who served four years in the Army before becoming an investigative journalist specializing in entertainment stories, then moving into filmmaking, is a director of considerable intelligence whose best work — such as 2000’s “The Contender” — has never quite engaged the imagination of the public.
Given the circumstances of its release — to digital outlets because of the ongoing covid-19 lockdown of most theaters — it seems unlikely that “The Outpost” will do much to significantly raise his profile among general audiences.
But it is one of the best American films to be released in this odd year, a patriotic chore that honors the sacrifice of ordinary men called to extraordinary service while refusing to embrace feel good triumphalism or ignore the inhumanity of the calculations of the old heads who send young people off to lonely, rocky places to die for high ideals.
“The Outpost” is a movie to make the experienced weep.