When director Peter Berg was granted access to autopsy reports and used them to recreate injuries sustained by four Navy Seals, including working with the costume department to ensure the mens injuries were as accurate as possible, you know you are in for a seriously realistic movie.
Starring Mark Wahlberg as Marcus Luttrell, a Navy Seal, who finds himself and his team on a mission to capture or kill notorious al Qaeda leader Ahmad Sahd. When the Seals are discovered by a few goat herders, things start going from bad to worse. After releasing the herders, they start to retreat but are ambushed by the Taliban. From there, one by one, each of the team gets killed, with the exception of Luttrell. Hence the title Lone Survivor.
This is a seriously realistic movie from bones to bullets, not to mention enough shrapnel removal to make even the hardest of you wince like a little girl. And its the realism on offer here, combined with nail shredding tension that will plank you on the edge of your seat for nearly two hours. Peter Berg has turned the tension dial up to 11, so much so when the Seals are in hiding, you won’t chew, sniffle or even breathe in case you’d cause their cover to be blown. Immersive isn’t the word.
Theres a fantastic cast here, with Mark Wahlberg playing Luttrell. And while he is genuinely brilliant here, he doesn’t really pull off the look as a Seal, especially compared to his supporting cast. Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch and Ben Foster all look like they’d just come back from Afghanistan. Its not a major distraction, but from time to time, it his look just lets him down.
Its only in the last 20 minutes does Lone Survivor start unravelling. In reality, Marcus Luttrell spent close to four days in the village, but from the movie’s perspective it feels closer to four minutes. It beggars belief that a movie would spend an extraordinary amount of time setting up its characters, being brutally realistic and will have you on the edge of your seat for the majority of its running time, and then just rush through the ending. That major gripe aside and besides the fact that Hollywood have changed a few things around including the firefight at the end which never happened in real life, Lone Survivor is a realistic, gripping and tense piece of cinema. Definitely a must see.
