A great movie about the war, where the war is the star

Rating: 10/10 (26 February 2013)

This is an excellent, gripping, fast moving film about America's war on terror. It's not a movie where the characters are large and the war is some kind of exotic backdrop for their adventures and feelings and romances.
This is not a WWII movie, with the street wise Italian, the Jewish intellectual, the Iowa farm boy, etc. We don't know anything about these fighters; we just watch how they struggle and fight.
It's a film about devotion to duty and endless work, not because the characters tell us so in tearful phone calls home, but because we watch them work, and watch the work lead nowhere or fall apart or blow up in their faces and how they (or their survivors) pick themselves up and start again, in the face of enormous odds against them, in a madrassa-educated country (Pakistan,in this case) that seems to hate them (and the rest of us) about as much as the declared jihadis do, and against pressure from higher-ups in their chain of command and Congressional oversight committees.
This is especially a movie for those who follow the news, read the books (The Looming Tower, Ghost Wars, etc.). We know who the ISI is, we know about the USS Cole, Khobar Towers; we remember Daniel Pearl, we even remember the episode with the Jordanian doctor.
We know the neighborhood; we know how incredibly cruel EVERYBODY is in this area, and to think that some want these bloodthirsty madmen to lawyer up, and further think that if we just stroll along like little Bo Peep, holding high a copy of the US Constitution, and keep our skirts clean, that thereby we'll win friends and influence people... is the saddest laugh of this benighted century so far.
I don't know how much of this story is true, but assuming a lot of it is, I'm enormously proud of these people who can only look forward to an anonymous star on a wall in Virginia.
They give us what security we have everyday as a gift, one that we unconsciously take for granted, which is often bought at the highest cost to these warriors' anonymous lives.