A Sea-Air-Land (SEAL) team member carries his Colt Commando assault rifle through the woods during a field training exercise. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Lone Survivor (2014) is an excellently wrought war movie that lets us know just how long a severely wounded human body can last. The wounds keep coming to the four Navy SEALs entrusted to a failed operation amid the forest trees of Afghanistan (and the SEALs give as good as they get). Another film based on a true story, though at long last it gets rather tiresome, it is incontestably powerful and has a mostly good momentum.
The dialogue is lousy—coarse—and apparently LS is not always journalistically accurate. But I agree with James Bowman that director Peter Berg’s “great achievement . . . is to take away the media’s political filter and show us war as men actually experience it, albeit at an unusually high level of intensity.” Too, it has a bigness about it that other contemporary war flicks lack.
