If a movie in which every Navy SEAL but one dies violently can be a feature-length recruitment video, “Lone Survivor” is it. There hasn’t been this bizarre mixture of hooah and death since John Wayne hung up his combat boots.
If the title doesn’t give away the ending, the opening does: Mark Wahlberg, as SEAL Marcus Luttrell, who wrote the memoir upon which the film is based, describes his salvation from a bloody 2005 battle with the Taliban in Afghanistan in which all of his teammates (as well as a separate, hastily assembled group of would-be rescuers) were killed.
Writer-director Peter Berg, the “Friday Night Lights” creator (and evidently one of Hollywood’s more patriotic voices) is fascinated, maybe even a little awed, with the rigor and camaraderie of the famously skilled SEALs. A training-camp sequence emphasizes agony and brotherhood in equal measure, and the takeaway from the film is that the latter is well worth the former. Put me down as not quite convinced.
Luttrell and squadmates Michael Murphy (Taylor Kitsch), Danny Dietz (Emile Hirsch) and Matt “Axe” Axelson (Ben Foster) are sent into the mountains on a mission to assassinate a Taliban leader. Instead, they are surprised by shepherds, which leaves them the seeming only options of killing these civilians or letting them go and risk having their cover blown to the enemy. The shepherds yield clues that they might be informers.
The most disturbing element of Berg’s script is that he seems to think the former course would have been the wiser one: Troops should waste any civilian who might be with the bad guys. War is messy, but it’s also not an excuse for wanton slaughter.
The rest of the movie is one bloody, horrible (but macho) killing scene after another, and right to the end the boys keep joshing and joking and lobbing one-liners in a way that sounds much more like a Hollywood screenwriter with his feet on the desk than men facing their mortality. Nor does the legendary fitness of the SEALs really come into play: The brawniest physique won’t save you when you’re bounding backwards down a mountain, your helmetless head getting slammed into a tree trunk.
Berg does convey a sense of what it must have been like for those men to fight and die on that mountain — the intensity, the determination, the desolation. The visuals are gripping, the sound effects magnificent.
But to what end? This is a movie about an irrelevant skirmish that ended in near-total catastrophe, during a war we are not winning. The nearest analogue I could think of was “Black Hawk Down,” but Ridley Scott’s dirge didn’t affect the larkish tone of Berg’s, in which every man seems to think he’s in a merry adventure. Pull back a bit from the jingoism and it’s hard to see what was purchased with so much brave young blood.