Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor takes the four-man SEAL team at the center of Operation Red Wings and grinds them down a mountain for two hours. The film opened in limited release in the United States on December 25, 2013, runs 121 minutes, and carries the tagline “Based on true acts of courage.” It is a war film, an action film and a drama, in that order of emphasis, and it is built on a nonfiction book by Marcus Luttrell with Patrick Robinson, published in 2007.
The result is a movie that is often punishing and rarely reflective, and it lands at 6 of 10.
Trailer, via Universal Pictures At Home.
Four Men Sent After Ahmad Shah
The setup is stripped to essentials. In 2005, Ahmad Shah, a local Taliban warlord in the Korangal Valley, is identified as the person responsible for the deaths of several Marines, plus many villagers believed to have aided American forces in Afghanistan. A Navy SEAL team — Michael Murphy, Matthew Axelson, Danny Dietz and Marcus Luttrell — is ordered to capture Shah.
Berg, who wrote and directed, drew much of his screenplay from Luttrell’s eyewitness accounts in the book, as well as autopsy and incident reports related to the mission. That sourcing shows in the film’s refusal to explain much. There is no briefing scene that tells you what the stakes are in political terms. There is a mission, a mountain, and a communications problem.
The four men are inserted overnight via helicopter. The terrain makes contact with J-Bad difficult. They identify Shah. Then they are discovered.
A Walkie-Talkie and a Released Shepherd
The film’s one genuine moral scene arrives early and passes fast. Local villagers spot the team, and one of them carries a walkie-talkie. Believing the villagers are Taliban sympathisers, the SEALs debate setting them free or killing them. Murphy orders them released.
That choice is the hinge of everything that follows, and it is the closest Lone Survivor comes to an argument rather than a re-enactment. The villagers alert the Taliban. The team proceeds up the mountainside, aborts the mission and intends to extract. Then the pursuit begins.
Berg does not linger on the debate. He moves. That is the film’s method throughout: it treats a decision that costs lives as a decision made in seconds, which is presumably the point, but it leaves the audience with less to hold than the moment deserves.
Down Into the Ravine
The firefight is the film’s centerpiece and its most accomplished stretch. The SEALs begin with the advantage. The sheer number of Taliban forces overwhelms their position. Pushed toward a ravine, they are given little choice but to jump, and are thrown off balance when an RPG detonates in front of them.
Dietz is killed. The remaining SEALs try desperately to raise support. Murphy scales the cliff to gain a clear signal, which finally alerts the QRF, and he is killed shortly after.
Based on true acts of courage
That tagline is doing a lot of work for a film that spends its back half on attrition. The mountain sequences are loud, disorienting and committed. They are also repetitive in a way that the real event presumably was. What is on screen is a long fall.
Two Chinooks, No Apache Support
The QRF scrambles to the SEALs’ aid. Two Chinook helicopters fly in without Apache support. Luttrell and Axelson are briefly encouraged by the arrival of reinforcements, then watch helplessly as an RPG shoots down one Chinook. The second aborts.
Already grievously wounded from battle, the disoriented Axelson is cornered by Taliban gunmen and killed.
This is where Lone Survivor becomes something narrower than a war film. It becomes a survival film about one man, and the shift is abrupt. The ensemble that carried the first hour is gone, and what remains is Mark Wahlberg as Luttrell, alone, moving through terrain that has already killed everyone around him.
Ben Foster Outworks the Script
The cast was assembled over years. Berg had discussed the project with Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch and Ben Foster well before shooting. Wahlberg plays Petty Officer First Class Marcus Luttrell; Kitsch plays Lieutenant Michael “Mike” Murphy; Hirsch plays Petty Officer Second Class Danny Dietz; Foster plays Petty Officer Second Class Matthew “Axe” Axelson. Eric Bana plays Lieutenant Commander Erik Kristensen.
Foster is the standout, and it is not close. His Axelson has a jittery, unglamorous energy that the script otherwise avoids, and his death registers because he had been allowed to be a person rather than a symbol. Wahlberg is asked to carry the film’s final act with a performance that is mostly physical endurance, and he does it without much range to work with.
The preparation was serious. Luttrell ran a three-week bootcamp in New Mexico where the actors learned weapons handling, military communications and tactics from elite personnel. Military advisor Mark Semos put the four leads through live-firing exercises so they could feel what a military rifle does to a body, and they drilled “shoot move cover” until the reactions looked like training rather than choreography.
Luttrell and several other Navy SEAL veterans acted as technical advisors, and multiple branches of the United States Armed Forces aided the production. Zarin Mohammad Rahimi, who acted as a technical advisor during production, appears as an elderly shepherd who discovers the four-man SEAL team. Nicholas Patel and Daniel Arroyo play the goat herders who assist the shepherd.
New Mexico, 42 Days, Digital Cameras
Principal photography began in October 2012 and concluded in November, after 42 days. Filming took place on location in New Mexico, using digital cinematography. Industrial Light & Magic and Image Engine created the visual effects.
The New Mexico landscape does not look like the Korangal Valley, and the digital photography gives the whole thing a slightly flat, televisual sheen that undercuts the scale. This is a film that wants to feel like a documentary and keeps reminding you it is a production. The helicopter sequences are the worst offenders — clean, weightless, obviously composited.
The 42-day schedule explains a lot. Berg shoots fast and cuts faster, and the film’s momentum is real. But momentum is not the same as shape, and Lone Survivor has trouble finding a rhythm beyond escalation.
A Book Bought in August 2007
Universal Pictures acquired the film rights in August 2007, after bidding against other major studios. Berg had arranged several meetings with Luttrell upon first learning of the book that year. After directing Battleship for Universal, Berg resumed working on Lone Survivor.
That history matters, because the film carries the priorities of an adaptation rather than an inquiry. It dramatizes the unsuccessful mission. It does not interrogate the rules of engagement that produced the shepherd decision, the air support that did not arrive, or the fact that a four-man team was sent after a high-level Taliban operative in terrain that made communication unreliable.
Instead it asks the audience to endure alongside the men, and it succeeds at that. Whether endurance is the same as understanding is the question the film never puts to itself.
What Six Out of Ten Buys You
Lone Survivor is a well-made, narrowly conceived war film that earns its tension and spends it all on the same beat. The firefight sequences are among the better sustained action passages of the 2013 release calendar, and Foster’s work is the kind of supporting performance that should have gotten more attention than it did. The sourcing from autopsy and incident reports gives the details a hardness that most films in this genre lack.
But the film mistakes intensity for depth. It has one moral scene and rushes it. It has an ensemble and abandons it. It has a political backdrop and ignores it. What is left is a long, loud, sincere account of men dying in sequence, which is true to the event and thin as a film.
The published critical score sits at 6.0 out of 10, with Metacritic at 60 out of 100. That is the right neighborhood. Lone Survivor is not a failure; it is a film that does one thing extremely well and refuses to do anything else. Berg got the mountain right. He never quite got the mission.
Hard Numbers
- Release: limited US release December 25, 2013
- Runtime: 121 minutes
- Director and writer: Peter Berg
- Based on: the 2007 nonfiction book by Marcus Luttrell with Patrick Robinson
- Principal photography: October to November 2012, 42 days, on location in New Mexico
- Visual effects: Industrial Light & Magic and Image Engine
- Score: 6.0 out of 10 (Metacritic 60 out of 100)
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