Restrepo: one platoon on the frontline in Afghanistan
June 22, 2010 4 Comments
“This is a shithole. We’re going to die here.”
The Korengal Valley in Afghanistan is known to the U.S. military as the “deadliest place on Earth.” It’s the setting for the deployment of the men in Second Platoon, Battle Company of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, who we meet in “Restrepo,” the 94-minute documentary directed by Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger that opens in New York and Los Angeles this Friday.
The film is a you-are-there immersion in a soldier’s life as he stares down death on a daily, and oftentimes minute-by-minute basis. It’s also completely apolitical, choosing only to portray what it is like to be in combat.
The film and oupost take its name from a medic killed in action, who is glimpsed in the beginning of the film joking around with the guys as they travel to their post. It’s the last moment of anything resembling normalcy, because the action soon drops them into a remote, isolated mountain area. If not for the deadly fish-in-a-barrel situation of the troops, the sense of loneliness would be overwhelming.
Restrepo, which won the Grand Jury Prize from the Sundance Film Festival this past January, leaves traditional narrative-style documentary behind. Embedded with the troops, Hetherington and Junger pointed their cameras at the troops, and recorded what happens over the course of the 15-month deployment. They capture the mortar strikes, the fiery salvos flying through the air, bullets whizzing by, and the emotional reaction to the death of a comrade mid-battle, all in a very effective cinema verité style.
Interspersed are interviews with a few of the soldiers shot three months later in Italy. No individual voice emerges from this reflection and commentary. Instead the cumulative effect is more of a chorus. They may have left Korengal physically, but their minds and souls are still there.
The soldiers’ experience of being shot at every day, of what it felt like to have “every bad guy in the country in my face,” is still raw. One soldier takes four to five sleeping pills daily, he says, “but I prefer not to sleep.”
We’re left to make our own conclusions. These events happened to these men, as it continues to happen every day to many other men and women like them, all over the world where the U.S is engaged in military operations. The film says this is way this is, right now. The question for us then becomes, what do we want to do about it?
Exactly, what are we going to do about it? Great review!
I think that’s what best about the movie–because it doesn’t overtly push any agenda, seeing the soldiers experiences makes you think very hard, and then you want to take some kind of action.
Thanks for reading and stopping by!
Junger does a great job in his reporting. I read The Perfect Storm and Fire and the way he presents his material really puts the story out front.
And he took these experiences to write his book, “War,” about being embedded with this platoon. But even if you’ve never read Junger’s work, you can still come away from this film with an idea of what it is like to be in combat. They’re never on camera, and you wouldn’t even know “this is Junger” by watching it.