A Hollow War Film

Rating: 6/10 (31 January 2014)

Something just doesn't click with Peter Berg's Lone Survivor.
It seems empty, a hollow movie that should have been filled in with care and concern for its main characters. Instead, more time is devoted to combat sequences—which are admittedly well done—than to any sort of character development.
Lone Survivor tells the true story of Marcus Luttrell, the sole survivor of a failed Navy SEAL mission, "Operation Red Wings" in the mountains of Afghanistan in 2008. Mark Wahlberg plays Luttrell convincingly, but his character isn't given much to work with. He has no solid back story, so the audience can't really connect with a familial side of him. Instead, all we know of Marcus is his love for his fellow soldiers, and we can cheer him on as a leader and warrior.
Berg (who directed and co-wrote) takes his time getting to the actual battle, which comes as the result of a bungled covert surveillance/capture-or-kill mission. Luttrell and three other SEALs have their location given away and are soon surrounded by Taliban fighters. This is where Lone Survivor is at its best: the action sequences are well-staged, compelling, and easy to follow, despite a rapidly moving camera and tricky terrain. Once the action begins, it rarely lets up.
However, the film's first forty-five minutes or so are combat-free, and one would think Berg would invest this time into developing characters and making the audience really feel the sense that these men have something at home worth fighting for. However, he chooses to attempt this through forced dialog (one character explains to his significant other back home that he has to "make that money" or something of the sort) and rather bland situations. By the time the combat begins, we really only care about the bond forged between our four heroes, and we can only care as much as for anyone we just met a half hour before.
By titling the film Lone Survivor, we expect casualties. We know that only one man is making it out of this mission alive, and Berg could have framed the looming sense of dread a bit better. Instead, he prefers long, drawn-out deaths, which seem somewhat sadistic at times. I understand that war is all hell, and that in a real-life setting, there's no cut-away from the harsh brutalities of death. But one SEAL's death in particular seems like cinematic overkill. In other cases, Berg eschews the generally gritty look of the film for fog-filtered, picturesque, slow-motion deaths which come across as stagy and shallow.
Lone Survivor is a well-made war movie, albeit one without a clear message. It is a simple retelling of facts, too true to them at points and too dramatized at others. It is no Black Hawk Down, or even The Hurt Locker. Nonetheless, its actors turn in realistic performances in their depictions of soldiers (Ben Foster and Emile Hirsch are especially good) in a film that ultimately keeps its audience at arm's length from them, emotionally speaking.
The most powerful aspects of Lone Survivor are its bookend montages of footage of the real SEALs involved in Operation Red Wings. I wonder if it would have been a better decision to have simply produced a documentary with the real Marcus Luttrell chronicling his amazing journey. It may have paid better tribute to the brave men involved in the battle than Peter Berg's Lone Survivor.