incredible story

Rating: 7/10 (18 May 2018)

This is the quasi-real story of the first days of the war in Afghanistan following 9/11, when a small team of special forces soldiers entered the country to support our new battle against the Taliban. I say quasi-real only because this is a Hollywood production, and there are almost inevitably changes made to amplify the drama and excitement no matter how exciting the real story was, but then again for all I know maybe it did go down exactly as depicted.
In any case, the movie depicts how the American soldiers went in with very little information or planning and only a vague goal that boils down to "support this guy because he's fighting these other guys", and found themselves in a world where people are living with roughly the technological sophistication we had here about 150 years ago.
It's not exact, of course, there are aspects of modern life here and there, but it's pretty stunning none the less. People live in structures without plumbing or electricity, travel on horseback, and communication is mostly done by face to face conversations or with walkies. In fact, the most common artifact of the modern world are the weapons.
Speaking of, seeing the contrast between the so-called first world and life in Afghanistan the thing that struck me was just how much effort humanity has put into efficient ways of killing each other. Looking at a world where you live in a hut and keep a herd of sheep for clothing and food, now filled with tanks, surface to air rockets, grenades, machine guns, and bomber planes, I couldn't help but think of the monumental effort it took to create all of that. The tons of raw materials mined and refined, collected from around the world and passed through sophisticated factories where it was pressed and molded and assembled, the chemistry bent towards creating reliable mass-produced explosives, the advanced rocketry used to create handheld weapons capable of firing explosives thousands of feet with accuracy.
It's kind of awe inspiring. Truly. It might actually be one of mankind's most impressive accomplishments. The ability to produce and transport such a bewildering array of lethal power, to bring it even here, about as far from anything resembling the modern world as it's possible to get, is pretty amazing.
We tend not to think of war as an "amazing" thing because the effects are so horrifying, but when I saw this I wondered how many other areas we can say we've developed with such single-minded purpose. The cell phone is often held out as one of the main marvels of the modern world, but even that technology owes most of its existence to the military, where the core technology was built for more effective battlefield communication, as were most of the technologies it utilizes like GPS and the Internet.
In any case, the movie is well made and paced, and it depicts a piece of the culture and history of a region many of us know very little about despite the fact that we've been engaged in a war there for years. I don't know if it was actually filmed in Afghanistan (my guess is probably not), but the cinematography is beautiful and seems authentic. Also, the stars are charismatic and engaging and the story is unique; it's worth a view.