Rat-a-tat tat I
Here’s yet another electric action film in the belligerent US tradition, writes Kavish Chetty
N Lone Survivor, the silent emerald forests of northern Afghanistan are splashed with crimson blood and echo with the harsh coughing of desperate rifles. Peter Berg has crafted an epic of war with all the classical contours of the action genre. This is not a sensitive or subtle film — the raw, masculine title spirits away all enigmas of plot and promises that only one will emerge alive.
This singular gentleman is Marcus Luttrell, whose memoir of a failed assassination attempt in the labyrinthine Hindu Kush mountains provides the narrative pulse. Luttrell (Mark Wahlberg) is joined by three young Seals, each with a rough sprawl of beard and set of plump pectorals, and dispatched on a counter-insurgent mission to execute Taliban leader Ahmad Shah.
From the opening credits, the film thrums with supercharged testosterone and squints through the usual ideological cataracts of US exceptionalism. It begins with a roughedged montage of military training and all its gung-ho energies. It moves to base camp, where we get an intimate glimpse of the four heroes at rest, with all their frat-house conversations and patriarchal in-jokes.
A valiant manliness — of the sort owing much to the benefits of steroids and warrior culture — is everywhere on display. It gives rise to eager quips like, “We do what we do, what we came here to do,” or other simian exchanges, all carrying the implicit meaning: “Let’s shoot things.”
When the four Seals (completed by Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch and Ben Foster) are dispatched into the lonely altitudes of the North, they are surprised by a goatherd and his two sons. Fearing the interlopers may alert the Taliban to their presence, they are plunged into murky moral waters: do they release them or, as one suggests euphemistically, “terminate the compromise”?
Although an ethical consciousness drifts around the edges, this is ultimately an action picture, and all moral ambiguities are simply the prelude for an almost hour-long shoot-out in the forests.
Lone Survivor has action scenes carefully calibrated to tighten and release tension. It triumphs in the rat-a-tat of close-quarter skirmishes and has a morbid relish for the goriest details of combat. Although Berg is a thoughtful filmmaker, grander political questions about US imperialism are left on the shores of his vision, and Lone Survivor becomes another electric action film in the typical US tradition: Afghanis are portrayed as either noble savages or hate-mongering warlords and their broader suffering and the complex geopolitical equations that bedevil their country are eclipsed by choreographed spectacles of violence.
The film supplies a marvellous rush of adrenaline. It has an absorbing atmosphere, so moodily conjured it almost makes you forget the moral blindspots and arrogances that tend to inform US war movies. Yet, after your nerves have repaired themselves from the thrill of this fantasy, the film leaves the usual clutch of unanswered questions trembling in its wake. LS