Actor-turned-director Peter Berg (he was great in Wes Craven’s Shocker!) has a knack for infusing jingo-istic military gung-ho storytelling with a relatively grounded sense of camaraderie and brotherhood. That ability is tested to its limit in this adaptation of former US Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell’s memoir about a violent incident in Afghanistan in 2005. If you smarted at the patriotic fervour in Berg’s last film, the underrated (seriously!) Battleship, you’ll have similar mountains to climb here.
Corralling the best cast of its kind since Black Hawk Down (which this film repeatedly evokes), Berg sets up the relationships and personalities of the soldiers quite well. Once they’re out in the field and the s**t starts to go down, we’re treated to a tense succession of rough-and-ready action scenes that are pretty compelling. Recalling some of the best “insanity of war” movies, these scenes effectively show how the human element conflicts with the very concept of war. Once the Hollywood-ready third act plays out however, I was struggling with the melodrama of it all, real story or not.
Lone Survivor is a proficiently-made film with plenty to enjoy, but truly embracing it is difficult outside of an American context. Many modern films about such matters acknowledge the wariness with which the world views the American military. This is not one of them.
