Joshua Reviews Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor [Theatrical Review]

While the “limited” rollout is a strategy usually mined by small independent features and documentaries looking to qualify a run for any given year’s Academy Awards, occasionally this method of building word of mouth buzz is a useful way to bring to light a film that could ultimately get lost in the massive dumping ground that is the fall film season. Perfect example? Peter Berg’s latest film, Lone Survivor.

Entering the fray in limited release Christmas Day (again, looking to qualify for a possible appearance at this year’s Oscar ceremony), this true life tale is a harrowing tale of men against seemingly impossible odds. Based on a failed military mission known as Operation Red Wings, the film introduces us to four men tasked with ending the life of a Taliban leader named Ahmad Shahd.  Inspired by a book written by one of the men we meet here, Marcus Luttrell, the film proves to be an interesting change of pace for the bombastic Berg, a film that was balked at by Universal when Berg had intended on putting this into production before his last film, the dreadful Battleship, but is arguably the director’s best piece of work to date.

Also written by Berg, the film is truly an intriguing, if not entirely inspired, look at the real horrors of war.  Berg, aesthetically, is very much the film’s star. With wonderful photography here, the film’s greatest attribute is its ability to create real geography within each and every chaotic set piece. Particularly the back half of the film, which is itself ostensibly one giant action set piece, stands to prove this film and its director to be as assured in its visceral bombast as you’ll find this fall film season. Berg’s pacing is a tad off, particularly with the film’s first half, which is indicative of the film’s overall major flaws.

Berg, when behind the pen instead of the camera, proves to be the film’s great downfall. Building a narrative that comes off more cliché-filled and monstrously jingoistic than the real life story of human survival, the film’s beginning half becomes a problematic bit of uninteresting banter between the men we will ultimately see be put through the most harrowing thing any person could imagine. Inherently a film about human courage and our hunger for survival even in the face of certain death, the beginning is structure to introduce us to the men we will follow, but instead it’s your standard bit of banter we’ve seen done, and done better, in various other war films. Aesthetically entrancing (especially when the film’s breathtaking score is brought into account), but while the story itself may be bewilderingly entrancing, it’s done with as much depth and characterization as the most standard entrants in this genre.

However, the performances here are all, for the most part, great. Led by Mark Wahlberg, the cast includes the likes of Emile Hirsch, Ben Foster and Eric Bana, all of whom turn in solid, if slightly broad, performances. The supporting duo of Foster and Hirsch are the stars here, both of whom really seem to fit well in the characters they portray, feeling as close to “lived in” as any performances here seem interested in being. Wahlberg is great as well, as is Bana, with the only real weak point coming in the form of Taylor Kitsch. Feeling odd in the role of the team’s leader, the performance is as flat and wooden as you’ve come to expect from Kitsch, a performance that itself is the only example of the performer falling into the same well worn characterization territory that the script falls victim to.

Berg’s picture may be striving, with its Oscar qualifying run this Christmas Day, for some sort of awards consideration, but for a film this unspectacular, the only thing one can expect is your usual war cinema jingoism and aesthetic bombast. Saved by a final half that proves Berg as both a bombastic action director as well as one with as much understanding of action geography as we’ve seen this year, Lone Survivor is an interesting bit of counter-programming for this fall/winter season, and yet is nothing more than a somewhat thrilling look at the human hunger for survival that seems ripped out of war films we’ve seen for generations now.