Du sang et des larmes

Greetings from Lithuania.

I read some reviews about "Lone Survivor" where it was mentioned alongside to a "Saving Private Ryan" - you can throw a rock at me if this comes close to "Saving Private Ryan" which is beyond many moons and seas compared to "Lone Survivor".

"Lone Survivor" is good action movie, with some heroic stuff (they definitely couldn't avoid that...), and i know that it's based on real events, thats why i'm giving it 8, because many of things displayed in picture were sadly true, many, but definitely not all. When someone is being killed in this movie (exept for bad guys from Taliban), it's shown in a similar way as Jim Caviezel aka.Jesus was suffering in "The Passion of the Christ" - only true American heroes die like that, not afghans who are more or less just a meat between bullets and Americans in this movie.

Overall, i liked this action picture, the sound design and sound editing were really top notch (no wonder it got 2 Oscar nominations) - you can hear every detail in the forest, every breaking bone (ye, the fall from cliffs scene was gripping). Actors were just OK, nothing special. The gunfight was terrific at least in the beginning of battle, truly terrific sound design and camera work. Later, well, when bad guys were shooting with RPG's every 2 min to our heroes, and they were suffering real good but still were able to do some heroic stuff, the tension was kinda lost.

Overall, 8/10 for me because of good production values and for that it is based on real events.

A truly brutal and gripping cinematic experience, Lone Survivor may be brazenly gung-ho and jingoistic, not to mention somewhat anti-climactic, but it delivers a metric tonne of thrills and contains one of the most intense and bloodiest gun fights I've ever seen in a film. It might stretch the suspension of disbelief a little too much at times, with our heroes surviving not 1 but fatal-looking cliff falls, but the excitement comes from the fact that it puts you right in the action, and you feel everything. Every bullet, every kick, every punch and every single thing the protagonist crash into. It's a bleak as Hell depiction of the savagery of war and just how strong the will to survive truly is. It's not a masterpiece, and many movies have been made with a more complex and compelling message on war, but for its sheer amount of heart-pounding action, scenes, it's definitely worth at least one watch.

You get so many action movies nowadays following familiar formulas that when you watch one of them you know that, just when the good guy is about to be overcome by an overmatching enemy force, the backup arrives and saves him. The formula desensitizes you.

But when a movie tries to be based on a real story, the good guys may not come. They do not come in an hour; they do not come in a day; and if they come, they are not invincible. Real problems do not follow formulas. Real life is sobering in its horror.

Lone Survivor does not have a very original or interesting premise for an action movie. An assassination mission goes wrong. However, the quality of the cinematography, solid acting and good action is what makes this a good action film.

Not a single actor phones it in. Everyone is trying to do their best. The film is also gorgeous. The Afghanistan these guys are in is fake because the entire movie was shot in the United States, but it looks authentic and breathtaking.

The action is raw and graphic. Not in guts-on-the-floor kind of way, but falling-down-a-cliff-side kind of way. Again, you can feel the effort put in. Broken ribs and punctured lungs were involved in the making of this movie.

There is one giant nasty pink elephant in the room and that's the fact that the main event at the centre of this movie's plot is bogus. Without spoiling too much, a crucial decision is made by these supposed Navy SEAL's and there is just no way this is how that situation played out. Therefore, the story is probably a lie.

There is another issue: this mission with its predetermined ending is all there is to the story. No backgrounds are given for the characters, no events other than this mission, and there is barely any examination of their relationships with one another. I remember as a little kid, I wrote a story about an imaginary military mission. I abandoned it because I realised that it can never be that interesting to read because the range of the story is too small. This film is like that. What's worse, the title of this film gives away the ending.

But it is a testament to Lone Survivor's quality that, even though it gives almost no background information about the characters, it still manages to make you care about them. And even with the weight of a potential lie at the centre of its plot, the film still manages to be such an interesting watch.

Based on the nonfiction book of the same name & set during the War in Afghanistan, Lone Survivor tries to recreate the US Navy SEALs' Operation Red Wings, a failed mission in which a survey team of 4 soldiers were tasked to locate the Taliban leader, Ahmad Shah. And even though it impresses in parts & has a lot in it to evoke the patriotic response from its target audience (which is American viewers obviously), Lone Survivor ends up going completely overboard in dramatizing the true events & suffers from the very clichés that most films of its genre find themselves trapped in.

What's right with this film is Peter Berg's dynamic direction, tense atmosphere, superb pacing, intense battle sequences, precision use of sound, music & relatively fine performances from its star cast who were actually capable of delivering more than what ended up being in the final print. What's wrong with it, however, is its lack of emotional depth or character development, sometimes going overly dramatic than required and too much reliance on action to push its story forward which ultimately crosses the fine line between exploration & exploitation to revel in the latter.

On an overall scale, Lone Survivor has nothing new to offer compared to what other films of this genre have already given us so far. Yes, it's brutal. Yes, it looks realistic to some extent. Yes, the battle sequences are disturbing, graphic &, in my opinion, explosively entertaining as well. But, there is also no denying that its characters remain hollow throughout its runtime, the story or characters aren't explored enough for us to invest our emotions in & all in all, this war drama is nothing less or more than a mere propaganda film, unfortunately.

The movie is not easy to watch. Right at the beginning you'll some training "videos" (more like footage) from the real people that are depicted in this movie. But it will be apparent a couple of moments later, that there is a lot of Death to follow. It's almost a case of what can go wrong will go wrong. And while there are a lot of other outcomes that this could've taken, decisions had been made, consequences had to be taken (upon).

What really gets you though are not some clichés about soldiers (and I think this stays as much as possible away from them), but the fact, that this feels as real as it can be, without you actually being in a war. Mark Wahlberg and the other actors have to go through a lot, when ... well you know what hits the fence. And it does hit pretty hard. Not for anyone squeamish, this is fraught with tension ...