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  • 标题:Lone Survivor.
  • 作者:Lighter, Jonathan E.
  • 期刊名称:War, Literature & The Arts
  • 印刷版ISSN:1046-6967
  • 出版年度:2014
  • 期号:January
  • 语种:English
  • 出版社:U.S. Air Force Academy, Department of English
  • 摘要:Writer-director Berg focuses on Operation Red Wings, a U.S. inter-service attempt in 2005 to eliminate one Ahmad Shah, the commander of a small but effective Taliban force in eastern Afghanistan. Red Wings left the real Marcus Luttrell the sole survivor of a four-man recon team sent into the Hindu Kush; to compound the tragedy, sixteen more SEALs and Army Special Operators died when an emergency extraction helo was lost to an RPG. Cost to Ahmad Shah: perhaps two or three fighters according to the best estimates, though not according to Lone Survivor, where, shooting-gallery style, the battered SEALs score head shot after head shot on a force alleged to number two hundred. (Analysts concluded it was closer to fifteen.) In any case, mischance and miscalculation turned Red Wings into a disaster for twenty Americans. Whether he was the principal author of that tragedy is the incubus that the real Marcus Luttrell, the twentieth, still wrestles with.
  • 关键词:Motion pictures

Lone Survivor.


Lighter, Jonathan E.


Peter Berg's well-acted, authentically detailed Lone Survivor (2013) is adapted--with a few liberties--from the 2007 bestseller by Marcus Luttrell (a decorated former SEAL) and ghostwriter Patrick Robinson (an author of Navy thrillers). Berg's film will appeal to moviegoers who like their violence intense, their villains bestial, their heroes indistinguishable, and said heroes' bones breaking and blood spurting as they tumble headlong, dying in slo-mo amid gorgeous peaks. Clearly on display is the stylistic influence of The Wild Bunch, Rambo, Saving Private Ryan, and, yes, The Passion of the Christ--which is to say, the very films one expects to guide the direction of many combat movies for years to come.

Writer-director Berg focuses on Operation Red Wings, a U.S. inter-service attempt in 2005 to eliminate one Ahmad Shah, the commander of a small but effective Taliban force in eastern Afghanistan. Red Wings left the real Marcus Luttrell the sole survivor of a four-man recon team sent into the Hindu Kush; to compound the tragedy, sixteen more SEALs and Army Special Operators died when an emergency extraction helo was lost to an RPG. Cost to Ahmad Shah: perhaps two or three fighters according to the best estimates, though not according to Lone Survivor, where, shooting-gallery style, the battered SEALs score head shot after head shot on a force alleged to number two hundred. (Analysts concluded it was closer to fifteen.) In any case, mischance and miscalculation turned Red Wings into a disaster for twenty Americans. Whether he was the principal author of that tragedy is the incubus that the real Marcus Luttrell, the twentieth, still wrestles with.

Severely wounded and at risk of freezing to death, Luttrell survived only because he was discovered and succored by anti-Taliban Pashtuns from a nearby village. Honoring the traditional injunction to protect helpless strangers, they defied Taliban fighters who threatened their family with death if they did not soon hand Luttrell over. It took five days for the Army to locate Luttrell and remove him and at least one of his saviors, Mohammed Gulab Khan, by helicopter. In Berg's version, though, the Army inexplicably refuses to evacuate Gulab.

So how could Marcus Luttrell possibly be responsible for the deaths of his comrades? Here's the film version. After ID'ing Shah at long range, the team is inadvertently discovered by an elderly goat farmer, a youth, and a young teenager, who are quickly overcome. The compromised and temporarily stranded SEALs must keep these unarmed civilians from alerting the Taliban, and the choices are stark: leave them tied up, probably to freeze or be eaten by wolves; kill them now; or "roll the dice," let them go, and hope for the best. (The actual SEALs carried no ropes or wrist ties: a fatal oversight that ruled out less drastic options which theoretically are still open to Berg on screen.)

A lively debate ensues among the SEALs. In the book, it's settled by vote; in the film, by the decisive order of Lieutenant Murphy (Taylor Kitsch): in both cases, and in accordance with the Rules of Engagement, the unarmed prisoners must be released. Berg has explicitly prepared us for this at the mission briefing--and at that moment, his camera pans briefly to a nameless SEAL who is played (uncredited) by the real Marcus Luttrell. Luttrell shakes his head in dismay and disbelief when he hears that American forces must "comply at all times with the law of armed conflict." Unarmed civilians must not be harmed.

Berg mutes the issue considerably by having Murphy decide. In the book, however, Luttrell casts the clearly decisive vote, one man abstaining. There Luttrell argues for release, but much later he fiercely castigates himself for being weak. Any "great commander," he says, would have executed the goatherds rather than let them alert Shah and thwart the mission. For the deaths of Murphy, Dietz, and Axelson, the book's devoutly religious Luttrell blames his own Christian conscience and especially the "squeaking and squealing liberals" whose dupe and potential victim he thinks he was. "Goddamned liberals," he says, are behind the pusillanimous law of armed conflict and rules of engagement, which, however both Caesar and Christ might endorse. Via ghostwriter Robinson, the book's Luttrell argues passionately for the right to blow away any suspicious Afghan or Iraqi civilian, anywhere, at any time. "I cursed ... myself for not executing them.... And let the liberals go to hell in a mule-cart, and let them take with them all their fucking know-nothing rules of etiquette in war and human rights and whatever other bullshit makes 'em happy."

Both book and film stress the certainty that the Taliban and their presumed liberal stooges (CNN gets emphatic mention) would stop at nothing to railroad the SEALs to prison for a triple killing that to Luttrell would be straight-ahead common sense. In a brief, high-tension scene Berg's Luttrell argues for mercy against his desire and better judgment on the basis of simple self-interest: "They got guys in Leavenworth doing twenty [just] for taking home trophy guns!" In other words, executing the man, the youth, and the boy is unacceptable, not because they're unarmed and it would be prima facie a criminal act under military law, but because the Taliban, the liberals, the liberal media, and the media-kowtowing Navy will nail the luckless SEALs to the mast. But since this is an action movie, Berg tells us nothing about Luttrell's later, complicated feelings of guilt for following orders he didn't want to follow.

The agonizing moral dilemma about unarmed prisoners taken behind enemy lines is textbook; the protective slant to Luttrell's argument is comprehensible to anyone; his belief, rage, and guilt (in the book) that he alone, under the evil influence of conscience and law, doomed the mission and sealed the fate of nineteen Americans (tragedies, moreover, that required additional contributing causes beyond his control) is worthy of Dostoevsky. And a movie that subordinated the blasting and bleeding and heroic soundtrack to that wrenching sense of guilt, instead of the other way around, could have been a memorable one.

But Peter Berg, alas, is not Dostoevsky. As Lone Survivor demonstrates, Berg is, for now, simply an accomplished director of action entertainment.
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