REVIEW: ‘Restrepo’ Focuses Admirably on Our Military But Willfully Ignores Their Noble Cause
by Mark TapsonBeginning in June 2007, filmmaker Tim Hetherington and war correspondent Sebastian Junger embedded themselves with a U.S. Army platoon in the truly God-forsaken Korengal Valley of Afghanistan near the Pakistan border. A companion piece to Junger’s new book War, Restrepo is their feature-length documentary centered on a fifteen-man outpost in one of the most remote and dangerous war zones on earth.
Trailer is NSFW
Its cinema verité style, interspersed with commentary from soldiers interviewed after the deployment, puts you in the center of the action – and inaction – alongside a half dozen or so principal characters. It captures the chaos and the boredom, the courage and the fear, the tension and the playful abandon of their stretch in Outpost Restrepo, named after their young medic, a Korengal casualty.
In between IED attacks, firefights, digging in on a cliff-side, negotiating compensation with the villagers for a dead cow, mourning dead comrades, rooting out arms caches in the village, and general horsing around, these soldiers, painfully young but becoming men before our eyes, offer honest and revealing emotions about these experiences. One soldier says he can barely get his head around it all; he just hopes that “one day I’ll be able to process it differently.” (more…)







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