'Lone Survivor' - Review

I’m still not sure if Lone Survivor is the best film I’ve seen in months, or it just looks that way because of all the crap I’ve had to endure the past few weeks (see reviews of Paranormal Activity – The Marked Ones and Devil’s Due for more on this), but right now I’m inclined to believe the former. In a post Black Hawk Down era, setting the right tone for a military action film based on true events is very hard to pull off tastefully and respectfully, and it’s to the films’ great credit that it manages to handle both exceptionally well.

Based on a U.S. Navy reconnaissance mission in Afghanistan gone horribly wrong, the film features Mark Wahlberg, Ben Foster, Taylor Kitsch and Emile Hirsch as the four marines sent into the mountain ranges to gather information on a village held by the Taliban. Kitsch, whose lack of charisma in previous roles (Battleship, John Carter of Mars) did little to inspire, actually plays the role of a marine very well, his stone-faced persona much more befitting of a hard-as-nails marine than an action hero. Ben Foster, who has in the past been saddled with an array of pretty-boy roles, plays the team sniper, the cold, professionally detached member of the group who is the centre of a moral issue that faces the marines as the film progresses and pulls it off with lock-jawed determinism.

But the star of the film truly is Mark Wahlberg, displaying the sort of performance that should warrant at the very least an Oscar nod, but has sadly been snubbed. Moving from calmly authoritative to absolutely terrified to a man on the furthest edge of desperation seamlessly as the plot develops, Wahlberg demonstrates perfectly how an actor in his prime can redeem himself for shameful past roles (see Max Payne and The Happening). 

Surprisingly, for around the first half of the film, the main attraction is not the performances, but the music and the cinematography. Composer Steve Jablonsky (in collaboration with Explosions in the Sky) breaks free from the stigma of scoring the films of Michael Bay and delivers a haunting, melancholic score that wonderfully compliments the various wide shots of the mountains sheathed in low clouds as the dying sun fades, lone helicopters swooping over the hills. 

The second the first gunshot is fired and all hell breaks loose, the music flees and is replaced by the pounding of guns, rumbles of explosions and the ripping of bullets through flesh. The violence visually is an intense mix of body horror, insane amounts of gunfire and realistic shaky-cam, the latter used to proper effect, placing the viewer in the heat of the action without disorientating or distracting them. Think The Hurt Locker with a decent measure of 127 Hours thrown in. The firefight, which takes up the latter half of the film, is remarkably intense and disturbing, drawing flinches, gasps and a fair amount of swearing from the audience.

The title Lone Survivor should tell you all you need to know, but the film keeps you interested in the characters, throws so much danger and intensity into it and keeps you so riveted that you often forget that only one of them makes it out alive, and when characters do start to fall left and right, it is an awful shock to the system and makes the engagement with them even more hard-hitting. The film does not paint the military as heroes, but does its very best to portray the marines involved in this horrific mission in a realistic and respectful way, highlighting the best and the worst of them and paying tribute to them all in the closing credits. I laughed, flinched, chewed my knuckles and cried my eyes out at this film. Please do your best to see it.

5 Star