Don’t let the title of this rigorous, engrossing movie turn you off. The opposite of the romantic-loner fantasy Mark Wahlberg pulled off in “Shooter,” “Lone Survivor” is about a team of men who operate like a single multi-celled organism. After these four Navy SEALs locate a fearsome Taliban leader in a remote, mountainous area, their mission gets fatally compromised. They soon confront a rush of radical villagers and Taliban fighters who pop out from behind every tree and rock that circles their makeshift base on a mountainside. They’re as trapped and outnumbered as the British soldiers in “Zulu.”
This film depicts group vitality and heroism, from the clipped opening montage, which illustrates the physical and mental toughness of SEAL training, through the staccato battle that the SEALs keep waging with gusto even when they’re barely alive. The visceral momentum sweeps you into combat so graphic you would otherwise look away. Sam Peckinpah once said, “If I’m so bloody I drive people out of the theaters, then I’ve failed.” Writer-director Peter Berg courts that danger as he molds this factual story to his strengths – rendering ripped-from-the-headlines trouble spots and subcultures with immediacy and realism.
As a screenwriter, Berg smartly adapts Marcus Luttrell’s first-hand account, dramatizing action that takes up a mere fraction of its pages. The SEALs’ ethos of clinging to combat as long as they can breathe, and using will to overcome pain, courses through this squad like a shared bloodstream. As a director, Berg brings a marksman’s reflexes to his craft and a SEAL instructor’s discipline to his cast. Wahlberg, who plays Luttrell, is the ideal actor to anchor this ensemble – he’s confident and generous, with gravelly warmth.
Taylor Kitsch’s understated nobility, Ben Foster’s surprising tenderness and frankness and Emile Hirsch’s touching befuddlement (he can’t understand how the Taliban move so faaaast) fix them as individuals. You recognize them even when, in desperation, they hurl themselves off a cliff to the rocks below, in search of a better battlefield. Berg and his editor, Colby Parker, Jr., deftly edit that piece of derring-do into one common, painful prolonged fall – you see each of them bound and rebound off crags and trees until they come to rest on a shaky plateau. In that sequence, and others, Berg stuns you with the SEAL’s hardheaded, hard-bodied daring.
The movie is more like a piece of high journalism than a work of art. Its way of expressing the brutal, relentless challenges of modern elite warfare is to become brutal and relentless itself. Yet “Lone Survivor’s” rocky integrity gets to you. In its own harsh, harrowing way, it pays heartfelt, tribute to fallen heroes. When these superbly trained fighting men take bullet after bullet, break bone after bone, then lock eyes and assure each other, “I’m good,” they renew the meaning of “band of brothers.”
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