A realistic high quality action flick with a lack of depth

Rating: 9/10 (7 June 2014)

Holy sh*t......
You get so many action movies nowadays following familiar formulas that when you watch one of them you know that just when the good guy is about to get overcome by the enemy, the backup arrives and helps him. The formula desensitizes you.
But when a movie is based on a real story, the good guys sometimes do not come. They do not come in an hour; they do not come in a day; and if they come, they are not invincible. Real problems do not follow formulas. Real life is sobering in its beauty and its horror.
Lone Survivor does not have a very original or interesting premise for an action movie. A squad of US navy SEALs is dispatched on an assassination mission. Things do not go as planned.
However, the quality of the cinematography, solid acting and good action is what makes this such a great film.
Out of all the actors getting to play a part not one is bad. Not one fakes it. It feels that everyone is trying to do their best.
The film is also gorgeous. It didn't have to be. It is. The Afghanistan these guys are in is fake because the entire movie was shot in the United States, but it looks authentic and breathtaking.
The action is raw and graphic. Not in a guts-on-the-floor kind of way, but falling-down-a-cliff-side kind of way. Again, you can feel that the people have tried to do a good job. You know how just much they tried? Broken ribs and punctured lungs were involved in the making of this movie.
If there is one problem I have with the film is that it has a self-imposing limit to how big or interesting it can be. It is a story about one military operation and nothing else. No background stories for the characters, no side events, and barely any relationship development. I remember as a kid I was really fascinated by the military ops and wrote a story, as good as I could, about an imaginary mission. Even as I was writing it, I realised that it can never be truly interesting to read because the range of the story is too small. And this film is like that. What's worse, the title of this film gives away the ending. It is basically a giant spoiler.
But it is a testament to the movie's quality that, even though the movie gives almost no background information to the characters, it still managed to really make me care about them. Even with weights on its legs, the film still manages to make such an interesting run.