Luke no Afeganistão

This is a wonderful little movie. Directed and produced by the same guys as the Trailer Park Boys this is a completely different type of movie. Great work with the muted colours and the dust and dirt of Afghanistan. I don't know how they were able to make BC look like Afghanistan but it is believable and convincing in the movie. It is a little predictable and contrived in parts but the characters are believable and I was hooked in from the very beginning of the movie. The ending however was strong and didn't cave to be a predictable Hollywood want-a-be ending. This movie was easy to watch, easy to understand but still had enough subsistence to allow for great conversations afterwards.

There is something in this film that brings out a visceral negative reaction from some reviewers. Perhaps it was not quite PC enough, or it offends a nationality or group. What is certain is this film is much better than the detractors portray.

The story follows Luke, a photojournalist, who thinks he's stumbled upon war atrocities committed by a Canadian sniper team. When his story is buried by his news service, he is compelled to return to Afghanistan with his friend Tom, who has other ambitions, to find out the truth. Luke soon finds out that the truth is hard to come by. As Elita (Pascale Hutton) tells him, "you try to make sense of this place, a place that makes no sense."

Just as in war there are parts in the story where nothing much is happening, then crazy people and crazy things happen, then all hell breaks loose. Bombs explode, people die, and you're left with many questions but not everything is answered. This is very much a war film, but it's no "action movie." It's no Battleship or G.I. Joe: Retaliation. You never know for sure who is a friend or who is the enemy. As Luke says "it's hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys, until they try to kill you." This is the essence of any insurgency, like Afghanistan.

The negative reviewers fault the film for some technical errors, like having four man sniper teams when they're usually two man teams, and then giving it 1 star. That's like slamming Apocalypse Now for having surf boards on Army helicopters or having Russian roulette in The Deer Hunter. Sure, there are no strip clubs on the Army bases in Afghanistan, but these few lapses can easily be overlooked for the true theme of the film. That war is nuts, and you have to be kind of nuts to be there.

The acting was very good, both the westerners and the Afghans. The movie was shot in Canada with excellent cinematography on a low budget, but it's easy to believe that this was shot on location. The country looks just as bleak and barren and occasionally beautiful as you've seen on the news reports. The action sequences are well done, it definitely feels like you're in the middle of a firefight when the bullets start flying.

What is certain is this movie deserves more serious consideration than it received. Maybe it's too soon, or maybe some object to a negative story about Canadian soldiers. It is definitely worth seeing and it's much better than the less than 5 out of 10 stars rating it has received on IMDb. See it for yourself, and there's a good chance you'll agree.

This movie was a ton of fun to watch, yet still does an excellent job of pointing out how complex and confusing the situation in Afghanistan is. I was shocked to discover this movie was shot in BC as it gave the feeling of the dusty, wide open spaces of Afghanistan. The plot twists and turns in a haphazard way which the professional critics disliked, yet I feel that it matches the nature of a country in turmoil, where humour and horror are combined in unexpected ways. Even though it is difficult to see a solution to the current situation in Afghanistan, I found it encouraging to see the characters grow as the country affects them.

I know this is fiction, but if you're going to have a movie embedded within an historical context, at least attempt to make that context somewhat accurate, or at least believable to anyone with even a limited knowledge of the event/events. I had to turn this off after 15 minutes there were so many inaccuracies.

The two things that did seem accurate.

1. It looked like it could be Afghanistan.

2. His guide was getting high.

Not accurate;

1. Snipers are not in four-man teams firing from moving vehicles. 2. There are no tent-bars in Afghanistan, much less those with dancing white women. Alcohol is against the law, and while I am sure that alcohol is smuggled in, it's abuse is not flaunted because it is illegal. 3. What newspaper has ever suppressed a story that denigrates soldiers?

Answer... none. The typical tact is to exaggerate every infraction and try to instigate it into some Muslim outrage and retaliation.

(2011) Afghan Luke DRAMA

Canadian freelance reporter/ journalist, Luke Benning (Nick Stahl) thinks he has witnessed from a distance a well renown Canadian sniper cutting a finger from each of his kills while fighting in Afghanistan. And upon going back to Canada, he tries to get it published, but with no avail he ends up getting fired for wanting to pursue it. So he decides to go back to Afghanistan to that exact same location where it all happened so that he can physically check on the bodies himself. From looking at the big picture, to make it a goal to convict a single person of war crimes, for something as trivial as checking up on people who're already dead and buried, you would've think that would have to be the least of his problems. I still have know idea why that is so important when they're worst things that happened in the war of Afghanistan, such as unreported sexual assaults of women in the military (The Invisible War), freelance shootings by covert operations and then cover up (Dirty Wars), and torture tactics at Guantanamo Bay, road side bombs, Taliban extremists targeting foreigners and Taliban extremists using children as martyrs, and I can go on forever. The other confusing aspect of this movie is the fact that viewers don't have any sense what this movie is about, is it about the reunification of Afghanistan people, the fact that they sell pot to make a living when their is nothing else, or to produce proper sanitation even though Taliban extremists also target foreign aid workers. This movie narrow mindedly addresses a small little problem out of something bigger. And as a result of them doing that, it kind of portray Luke Benning as an annoying douche.