Kaja­ki: The True Story

Hypo­thet­i­cal­ly speak­ing, what course of action would you take if you sud­den­ly found your­self caught in a mine­field? It’s a night­mar­ish sce­nario the major­i­ty of us will nev­er have to face, but that is the very real fate that befell a com­pa­ny of British Paras in Sep­tem­ber 2006, after they were tasked with nav­i­gat­ing a riv­er-bed rid­dled with anti-per­son­nel mines in the Tal­iban-con­trolled Kaja­ki Dam region of south­ern Afghanistan.

It’s an intrigu­ing premise around which to cen­tre a fea­ture film, although one that’s per­haps stretched a lit­tle too thin over the 108-minute run­time. Essen­tial­ly the entire final hour of the film shows lit­tle more than a bunch of blokes sit­ting around wait­ing for a heli­copter, which in itself isn’t par­tic­u­lar­ly cin­e­mat­ic. Yet full cred­it to direc­tor Paul Katis for con­struct­ing an oth­er­wise gru­elling and large­ly engross­ing reen­act­ment of this har­row­ing true story.

The prob­lem with intro­duc­ing land mines as a nar­ra­tive device is that the audi­ence already knows the out­come. Var­i­ous film­mak­ers have attempt­ed to get around this in a num­ber of dif­fer­ent ways, often sac­ri­fic­ing authen­tic­i­ty for sus­tained dra­ma — Danis Tanovic’s 2001 Bosn­ian War dra­ma, No Man’s Land, in which a Ser­bian solid­er places the corpse of a Bosn­ian solid­er on top of a mine as an ene­my boo­by trap, only to dis­cov­er that the solid­er is still alive, is a prime exam­ple. What sets Kaja­ki apart and makes it so affec­tive is its unflinch­ing realism.

Despite what films like The Mon­u­ments Men might lead us to believe, if you were to step on a mine, you wouldn’t know too much about it. Mines don’t go ​“click”; there’s no delayed grat­i­fi­ca­tion — they just explode. To para­phrase one Cap­tain Edmund Black­ad­der, if you step on one, nor­mal pro­ce­dure is to jump two hun­dred feet in the air and scat­ter your­self over a large area.

Katis knows this, and so he builds ten­sion not by teas­ing us as to whether or not a mine will det­o­nate, but instead keep­ing us guess­ing when and where the next one will go off. In the down­time between each pyrotech­nic blast, we get to expe­ri­ence what it would be like to see your mates suf­fer in the most severe con­di­tions imag­in­able. We also wit­ness the aston­ish­ing lev­els of brav­ery and cama­raderie required to sur­vive an inci­dent like this, as the sol­diers do every­thing they can think of to keep each other’s spir­its up in spite of their increas­ing­ly des­per­ate situation.

There’s no obvi­ous pro-mil­i­tary agen­da here, no gung-ho jin­go­ism or polit­i­cal grand­stand­ing. This is sim­ply a gris­ly account of mod­ern war­fare, com­pound­ed by the fact that, despite their train­ing, noth­ing could pre­pare these men for the hor­rors that await­ed them that day.