Well executed but could have been better

Rating: 7/10 (9 July 2017)

Initially I wanted to rate this movie 8. Because it is very well executed. It's tense, you feel like they are never gonna make it, you don't expect the chopper to be shot down, and neither do you expect the help from the villagers.
It is very dramatic and realistic, and while Mark Wahlberg is often too over the top, here he was right for the part. It is violent without being gore, and honestly I didn't mind having very little introduction to the characters. The movie is the mission, period.
But all over the movie something didn't feel right. The mountains felt weird, the light felt weird. The trees reminded me of my trip to the American South West. And what do you know, they shot this in New Mexico... At first I gave it the benefit of the doubt and thought "well maybe the mountains in Afghanistan look like this". They don't... I looked it up and there are pastures, fields, the trees are different, the landscape is different. I'm not saying they should have shot this in Afghanistan, but at least do it somewhere close in terms of vegetation and agriculture. Try Northern India, Kazakhstan, Western China, Turkmenistan... Countries where you can actually shoot. But this habit of just finding the closest thing right here in the US never works for me. In We Were Soldiers I could tell this wasn't shot in South East Asia (they did it in California), and here it does not feel like Afghanistan.