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.