Not Even Death Could Have Killed Him

Rating: 10/10 (23 July 2014)

On the 10th of January 2014, a movie hit the theaters that would leave everyone in the crowd shocked, crying, and filled with pride. This movie is Lone Survivor directed by Peter Berg and based off of a series of true events that were put into a book written by Marcus Luttrell, the only survivor of tale. The movie starts off with real footage of United States Navy SEALs boot camp and everything it takes to make it before they are granted the honor of calling themselves a Navy SEAL. The focus is then shifted to the mission presented to the unit which is a Taliban leader Ahmad Shah (Yousuf Asami) who is responsible for the death of over twenty United States Marines, as well as any villager or refugee who was aiding the American forces. In response to these deaths, a United States Navy SEALs unit was ordered to execute a counter-insurgent mission to capture or if needed take out Shah. The team assigned to the mission comprised of four SEALs: team leader Michael P. "Murph" Murphy (Taylor Kitsch), snipers Marcus Luttrell (Mark Wahlberg) and Matthew "Axe" Axelson, and communications specialist Danny Dietz (Emile Hirsch). The team is flown into the Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan, where they must make a trek through several mountains in order to arrive at their designated location, a small town miles away that Shah has overtaken. Along the way they find themselves accidentally discovered by an elderly shepherd and his two teenage grandchildren; one of which clearly shows his hatred of the U.S. SEALs and it thus assumed to have Taliban connections. After a heated conversation between the SEALs they agree to let the unarmed men go and quickly backtrack into the mountains in hopes of getting coms up for extraction. However, no matter how far they backtracked it wasn't enough and they were confronted with hundreds of Taliban men armed with rocket launchers, full auto rifles, and countless grenades. The next hour of the film turned into one of the longest and most intense ground force combat scenes of the last decade. Each of the men suffers serious injuries during the gunfight from jumping off the edges of cliffs, at least five gun shot wounds each, and countless broken bones. In the end, all but Marcus Luttrell lives to tell the tale of the brave men, both navy SEALs and the villagers that aided him in his escape. The movie wrapped up with a four minute montage of videos and pictures of the real men involved with this tale as well as an epilogue to what happened to the survivors afterwards. The overarching theme of this movie is what the will to survive can drive a person to do as well as what the hope to make change happen can make a person risk in order to see it done. The men in this story take an unimaginable amount of damage to their bodies and are still able to take out about ⅓ of the Taliban forces themselves. Such bravery is demonstrated when Danny Dietz treks up a hillside swarmed with Taliban in order to get the coms up, alerting the base of their location. On top of earlier injuries, he is shot six times before making it to the top and the final shot caused Dietz to fall to his knees, but no further, he did not fully fall to the Taliban, even in death. The other theme of this movie is the drive to make change happen as well as the overwhelming kindness of a people. Towards the end of the movie Marcus was found by a local Pashtun village leader, Mohammad Gulab (Ali Suliman), who takes in Marcus and attempts to nurse him back to health. After a few days the Taliban arrive with the mission to execute Marcus, but were driven away by Gulab and the villagers. However, they planned on coming back in full force with Shah leading the assault. Gulab knows that they cannot hold Shah's forces for long, so he sends an unidentified mountain man to hike the fifty plus mile journey to the nearest American air base. Why did these people risk everything to help an American SEAL who has taken the lives of their fellow brethren? Because the villagers of that town were bound to help Marcus as part of a traditional code of honor known as Pashtunwali, a true act of selflessness that Marcus could never fully repay. This movie stunned everyone in the theater I was in. During the montage and epilogue at the end, not one person got up to leave; everyone was still as a mountain, and tears were cascading down everyone's face--even the toughest of men were not afraid to cry. We witnessed a movie that could only show a glimpse into the bravery that those men had, and that small glimpse was more than any of us thought possible for a human being to muster.