Lone Survivor | Little White Lies

Lone Sur­vivor

30 Jan 2014 / Released: 31 Jan 2014

Words by Paul Fairclough

Directed by Peter Berg

Starring Ben Foster, Eric Bana, and Mark Wahlberg

Soldiers in military gear carrying an injured comrade through a wooded, rocky terrain with smoke and debris in the background.
Soldiers in military gear carrying an injured comrade through a wooded, rocky terrain with smoke and debris in the background.
2

Anticipation.

This SEAL lionising is getting old.

3

Enjoyment.

Overlong yet relentless bone-crunching action.

4

In Retrospect.

No Black Hawk Down but no Act of Valor either.

There are nuggets of hon­esty amid the gung-ho jin­go­ism in Peter Berg’s star­ry-eyed war story.

It’s called Lone Sur­vivor and it stars Mark Wahlberg so, with no dis­re­spect to Eric Bana and Ben Fos­ter who also fea­ture, we can prob­a­bly dis­pense with all that Spoil­er Alert busi­ness from the off. In fact direc­tor Peter Berg sen­si­bly opts to open with Wahlberg’s title char­ac­ter, US Navy SEAL (for it is they, again) Mar­cus Lut­trell, being chop­pered to safe­ty after a dis­as­trous mis­sion that has claimed the rest of his team.

Luttrell’s flash­back to the mission’s incep­tion, kid­ding around with his bud­dies at an Afghan air base, is thus already infused with fore­bod­ing, and the sto­ry is a real one; Lut­trell and his three com­pan­ions real­ly did head off in 2005 to assas­si­nate a key Tal­iban com­man­der, things real­ly did go hor­ri­bly wrong for them and a load more peo­ple who came to res­cue them real­ly did die. It was the kind of all-Amer­i­can fuck-up that, as Rid­ley Scott proved with Black Hawk Down, can be a gift to a filmmaker.

Berg has form with dust-caked male bond­ing, in Fri­day Night Lights and The King­dom, so it’s no sur­prise that his set-up here is impres­sive­ly han­dled. One sequence, in which two bare-chest­ed SEALs race one anoth­er at dawn around the air­base perime­ter, neat­ly posits these men as heirs to the heroes of Greek antiq­ui­ty — per­fect spec­i­mens infused with the desire to win at all costs. If that sounds too brit­tle a dra­mat­ic core, Berg tem­pers the spar­tan ide­al with some pret­ty hokey but prob­a­bly authen­tic touch­es: the sol­diers quote Ron Bur­gundy, belly­ache about domes­tic chores back home, Skype their fam­i­lies and, in a scene that is lat­er echoed dark­ly, argue over whether to shave off a comrade’s eye­brows as a forfeit.

It’s when the shoot­ing starts that things go awry. That the film is a long, fero­cious gun­fight book­end­ed by some char­ac­ter explo­ration isn’t a prob­lem in itself — Scott’s film was exact­ly that and none the worse for it — but Berg has trou­ble main­tain­ing a dynam­ic that hooks the audi­ence in. By the time Lut­trell and his crew are sur­round­ed for the third time, we’re clock­watch­ing and won­der­ing when we’re going to get to the Alamo bit. But the Tal­iban keep com­ing, get­ting mowed down at a rate that, in the real world, would have end­ed the war 10 years ago. (Just as relent­less, but less grip­ping, is the evi­dent hero com­plex Berg and Wahlberg have con­cern­ing these men.)

Both have made much of how they spent time with fam­i­lies of the dead and with serv­ing SEALs but, on this evi­dence, a lit­tle dis­tance would have made for a bet­ter movie. When the long end cred­it sequence fea­tures fam­i­ly snaps of the real men who died, sound­tracked to Peter Gabriel’s ver­sion of Heroes’, it’s clear that at some point Berg switched from film­mak­ing to hagiog­ra­phy, and that he’s much bet­ter at mak­ing movies than he is at mak­ing saints.

Lone Sur­vivor is far supe­ri­or to the bul­ly­ing, bom­bas­tic movies about the US mil­i­tary that are all too com­mon right now but the self-fla­gel­lat­ing, mor­bid­ly star­ry eyed aspects of the film even­tu­al­ly win out and deval­ue its many moments of hon­est storytelling.

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