Watch Marcus Luttrell Responds to ‘Lone Survivor’ Critics as Only He Can in Megyn Kelly Interview
Jan. 14, 2014, Media
“There’s nothing glorious about war.”
Lone Survivor Shows Our Boys Suffering, But It Doesn't Ask Why
By AMY NICHOLSON, published: January 09, 2014 (CAUTION: Profanity)
Lone Survivor was written and directed by Peter Berg, based on the book by Marcus Luttrell;
and stars Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Ben Foster, Emile Hirsch, Ali Suliman, Eric Bana, Alexander Ludwig, Yousuf Azami and Sammy Sheik.
Rated R. Here's a movie that'll flop in Kabul. Lone Survivor, the latest by Battleship director Peter Berg, is a jingoistic snuff film
about a Navy SEAL squadron outgunned by the Taliban in the mountainous Kunar province.
After four soldiers—
- played with muscles and machismo by Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch and Ben Foster—
and summon an airlift before these civilians can sprint to the nearest village and alert local leader Ahmad Shah.
It doesn't go well.
Berg's flick bleeds blood red, bone-fracture white and bruise blue.
It's based on the memoir Lone Survivor:The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10
by sole evacuee Marcus Luttrell
- (played by Wahlberg)—
Luttrell didn't exactly write his book.
Rather than sitting in front of a word processor, he was back in action in Iraq.
Instead, the United States Navy hired British novelist Patrick Robinson, who, among other embellishments, upped the number of enemy Taliban fighters from 10 to 200.
Hey, whatever, man.
Those aliens in Battleship weren't real, either.
Lone Survivor's problems are more complex than its Rambo-esque exuberance for machine-gun fire.
The near-wordless second half is a deadly dubstep of bullets and snare drums punctuated with the occasional curse.
Here's 90 seconds of dialogue transcribed in its entirety:
- "G__d__n, this s__ks!" "F___ you!" "F___!" "Damn, f___ing burns!"
- Don't die.
These four men were heroes.
But these heroes were also men.
As the film portrays them, their attitudes to the incredibly complex War On Terror, fought hillside by bloody hillside in the Afghan frontier with both U.S. and Taliban forces contributing to an unconscionably high civilian body count, were simple:
- Brown people bad, American people good.
- a dilemma that, morality aside, could have been solved if any of them had recalled that middle school logic problem
about the fox, the chicken, the feed and the too-small boat—
- "That's death. Look at death."
- "You can die for your country—
- I'm going to live for mine."
We're meant to cheer, not that anyone in my theater did.
But there will be audiences who do, and I'm not entirely sure I'm comfortable with what they're cheering for.
This is death. Look at death.<
Berg is no dummy.
He's done the right thing by refusing to whitewash these guys as saints,
- although three of the four are depicted as devoted husbands and fiancées,
and the fourth gets to be Mark Wahlberg.
- building his case with an opening montage of actual Navy SEAL training footage
in which screaming instructors winnow a pack of athletes into an all-for-one-one-for-all band of bad_ss brothers
who, when forced to float in freezing ocean waves, link arms and sing "Silent Night."
They were ready for action.
- "We wanted that fight at the highest volume," Wahlberg says,
"the loudest, coldest, darkest, most unpleasant of the unpleasant fights."
Each, as with Wahlberg's Luttrell, had families and friends and a full life, and each gets dispatched without a second thought.
I'd like to think that, on some level, Berg is questioning the sense of a film—
- and a foreign policy—
- that makes target practice of our magnificent teams of hard-bodied, hairy-chested, rootin'-tootin', shootin', parachutin', double-cap-crimpin' frogmen,
these soldiers who decorate their bunks with baby pictures of themselves next to an American flag
and are so nobly eager to sacrifice their lives for one another and their country.
Instead, Lone Survivor just reads like a quasi-political exaggeration of a slasher film:
- the cellphones that don't work, the rescuers just out of reach, the killers chasing our victims through the woods.
What are we meant to learn from this waste of life?
Who is even to blame?
All Lone Survivor offers is the queasiest apology of the year.
Grunts a battered Wahlberg to his even-more-battered best buddy,
- "I'm sorry that we didn't kill more of these motherfuckers."
- "Oh, don't be f___ing sorry.
We're going to kill way more of them."
Glenn, you have the CORRECT IDEA.
- Put the sniveling coward AMY NICHOLSON face-to-face with a TRUE AMERICAN HERO.