Laughably Unrealistic Propaganda and Fake War

Rating: Null/10 (22 March 2019)

If only the Turkish military had shown the same balls when innocents were being slaughtered in Kobani that are exhibited by the heroic special force unit in this exercise in nationalist propaganda disguised as cinema! Maybe then Alper Caglar's phony plot might have some credibility. But the fact remains that Turkey stood behind its border while ISIS committed atrocity after atrocity. But that was okay since the victims were mostly Kurds and Shia Arabs. What is perhaps most disturbing about this film is its message that Turkish soldiers are willing to disobey orders, sacrifice their lives and plant the Turkish flag in the Syrian territory of their fellow Turks (Turkmen) and Kurds. This is precisely what Turkey's military did, but only after the Kurds and Americans had defeated ISIS for the most part there. So this movie would have been more realistic if the enemy the special forces was killing--in one of the most astonishing displays of shooting accuracy and dodging enemy bullets I have ever witnessed on film--was the Kurds who had done the real fighting against ISIS.
This film may sooth the guilty or even cowardly conscience of Turks who stood by while Kurds and others did the fighting and defeating of ISIS, but it is nothing more than the equivalent of fake news. It is fake war. It might make the wannabe neo-Ottoman sultan Erdogan and his sycophants happy, but it and dishonest history, a problem that has plagued Turkey since its founding. The film probably also warmed the heart of a majority of Turks, whose nationalist brainwashing is reflected throughout Caglar's script in the plot-line and repeated references to the love of the "homeland" the "Turkish people" and their "flag". But Alper Caglar will never be recognized as anything more than a schlock filmmaker if he can get beyond the excessively patriotic nonsense of this film.
Alper Caglar showed momentary flashes of a deeper, less parochial mindset in a couple of scenes, but his characters were for the most part simply too cartoonish to be taken seriously. When he makes a film that takes a genuinely hard, critical look at his country's excessive nationalism, and mistreatment of Kurds, journalists and government dissenters, viewer outside Turkey will begin to give him serious interest, as he clearly knows something about the mechanics of filmmaking--but little if any of its art. If he really wants to show he has some cojones as a filmmaker, all he need do is make one about the Armenian Genocide deniers. Now that would truly be historic--if he could even do so within his great homeland of which he is so proud.