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I'm going to open this review by getting straight to the point:  Lone Survivor is just perhaps, the best war film I've ever seen.  In other words, I'm going to have to revise my top war films of all time list.  This is a statement of some considerable controversy.  I can already hear the detractors, "Better than Saving Private Ryan?  Better than Apocalypse Now?  Better than Platoon?"

In its own way, yes.

 Perhaps better than any film I've seen before, Lone Survivor develops a sense of place, and then deposits us the viewer into that fully fleshed out, developed, bloody moment.  So vivid and intense is the experience, that I entirely forgot I was watching a film during my viewing, I was entirely transported into the experience, which is, in turns, harrowing, nerve-wracking, intense, and ultra-violent.

Lone Survivor is not Apocalypse Now, which is to say it's not a philosophical contemplation on the state of man and war.  It's also not Saving Private Ryan, some rousing sweeping historical drama.  It is an intimate portrait of four Navy SEALs behind enemy lines in Afghanistan, fighting to live at all costs.  (As war films go, it's fairly close in spirit to Blackhawk Down, a hyper-intense re-enactment of a mission gone wrong, while providing the viewer with a harrowing realistic vision of combat.)

For those not familiar with the story, this film, directed by Peter Berg (Battleship), is based on the book of the same name by Marcus Luttrell, the lone survivor of a failed 2005 mission in Afghanistan that resulted in the death of some 19 Special Operation forces.

 The story starts quickly with Luttrell and three fellow SEALs on a recon mission (code-named Operation: Red Wing), to find and possibly assassinate a top al Qaeda figure responsible for the deaths of numerous Marines.  (Luttrell is played by Mark Wahlberg, and the other three SEALs are played by Ben Foster, Emile Hirsch, and Taylor Kitsch, all of whom deliver fantastic performances.)  While spying on this figure on top of a mountain, effectively "behind enemy lines," they realize that the size of his forces are much larger than was originally estimated.  Then, quite suddenly, without warning, three goat herders accidentally stumble upon their position.

What happens next is one of the great ethical questions of military conflict:  What do they do with the goat herders?  (I wrote about this and other dilemmas here.)  These goat herders are unarmed civilians, and the rules of engagement are clear that they have to be let go.  But the SEALs know that the moment they release them, these goat herders will race to the enemy in the village below and alert them of the presence of the SEALs, meaning almost certain death for the SEALs who would be heavily out numbered.

As one might guess from the title, the SEALs did the right thing (or was it the wrong thing?) and released the goat herders who, of course, informed the enemy forces below that ended up swarming the mountain.  And this gets us to the heart of the film, what is effectively an hour and a half long combat scene as three SEALs attempt to survive against an enemy force of at least a couple hundred that has surrounded them on all sides.  Did I mention that the tall mountains are effectively cutting off their communication such that they have no contact with their chain of command?  (As an infantry soldier in Afghanistan myself, and as the company RTO (Radio Telephone Operator) this was a problem I had to deal with all the time!)

What I found so refreshing about this film is that it lets the viewer know, right from the start of the action, that it's not going to abide by many of Hollywood's standard action film tropes.  In other words, the protagonists don't get to kill a innumerable amount of enemy forces without taking any damage themselves.  In fact, almost as soon as the action starts, the SEALs start getting shot.  Most of the SEALs spend a large portion of the film in various stages of dying, which is much more realistic than being magically untouched by flying bullets as so many war film protagonists seem to manage.  (That said, the SEALs in the film still seem to have the magic marksman accuracy famous to war film protagonists everywhere, where every shot hits its mark and fells an enemy combatant.)  

If anything, the characters in the film endure too much injury, more than once I marveled at how these characters could still be alive after the amount of damage they had supposedly incurred.  In fact, this film abides by almost all of my war film rules:  War films should be violent, deaths in combat should not be romanticized, and action films should not be absurd.  (Post-script:  Further investigation into the accuracy of the book on which the film is based, raised some disturbing questions that I've dealt with in this follow-up article.)

When the SEALs finally do manage to make radio contact with command that sends in a QRF (Quick Reaction Force), the helicopter is immediately shot down, resulting in the further deaths of another 8 SEALs and 8 Night Stalkers.  It's not giving anything away to say that Luttrell is the only one who survives, before going on to write his best-selling book and then to have a movie (this one) made of that book.

When reviewing a film, part of the calculus is to assess what the film aspired to be.  If a film is a sweeping historical epic, then you judge it differently than if it's a comedy.  Lone Survivor aspires to only be the real-life story of a single Navy SEAL that survived against incredible odds.  It's technically flawless, the action is credible and coherent, and the performances are exceptional.  As a film its intense, exciting, moving, and relentless.

What else could one ask for from a war film?