An anti-recruitment movie?

Rating: 5/10 (26 May 2015)

The good news about this tribute to a team of Marines who lost their lives in Afghanistan is that it is surely not going to lure any prospective recruits into making the same mistake. The plot basically comprises a long concatenation of ludicrous mistakes followed by payback in the form of nightmarish, impossible scenarios, and culminating in death for most of the participants.
The bad news is that, as usual, this Hollywood war movie production portrays the Americans as always righteous and just and their adversaries as ignorant and evil. I did not buy the part about the "good" Afghans coming to the rescue of the lone survivor--at the price of all of their own lives? Doesn't make a lot of sense. Let's face it, even if they hated the Taliban, they also knew that the Americans were generally making their country far less stable and secure than it was before they arrived in 2001. The US military and CIA also killed their share of entirely innocent civilians, just as they did also in Iraq.
I see that there are some pretty high ratings, which is in some ways surprising (see the good news, above), but in other ways not so surprising (see the bad news, above). The fact that the plot is loosely based on the recollections of the lone survivor of the incident probably causes patriotism and loyalty to well up in the hearts of some reviewers, leading ultimately to clouded judgment about the quality of this production.
I will say that this is okay as a pure action film, if you happen to like to see lots of blood and guts. But this was pretty unrealistic. The soldiers survived falling down cliffs and multiple deep lacerations and bullet wounds before finally dying. In some ways, the melodrama smacked of staged WWW wrestling matches.