Restrepo

Restrepo follows a platoon of soldiers in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, once given the moniker of "deadliest place on Earth", through their 15-month deployment starting in 2007. The title comes from Pfc. Juan Restrepo, a medic in the platoon who was killed in action. His comrades honored him by naming their forward operating base after him. The movie alternates between the footage Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger shot while embedded with the platoon and interviews they did with the soldiers in Italy. And so you get a mix of life in the Valley as well as talking heads reflecting on their experiences.

It opens with some home video footage of Restrepo and his friends on a train in Italy shortly before deployment. They are drunk and ready to take on the world. We then find the camer riding down a dirt road in Humvees when suddenly an IED goes off and disables the vehicle ahead of the one that the two filmmakers were in. A close call. But the adrenaline rush of this scene dissipates as we are given some background on Kornegal Valley and slowly get to know the members of the platoon.

We hear that the soldiers will get shot at every day but much of the time we see them clowning around and getting their base in order. Another scene involves the weekly meeting that Captain Kearney has with the local elders. He talks about building a road which will make these people rich while the elders demand justice for the cow that the soldiers had killed. There is a great close-up of one of the elders fumbling around with the juice pack given to him by the soldiers. He just rolls it around in his hands and never manages to get the straw in. It's absolutely perfect. All the Afghans are older while the Americans are younger. The Americans talk about a promising, wealthy future while the Afghans are concerned with the here and now and just getting by. To me, these scenes really symbolize our whole venture there.

I was surprised at how few combat sequences were shown in the movie. But, when it was going on, it was intense. During one Kearney calls in an airstrike and an A-10 is happy to oblige. Afterwards some of the platoon investigates the damage. One family's house has had walls reduced to rubble and there are many casualties. An Afghan man holds the lifeless body of a child and says, "We have five dead and 10 women and children injured. Show me which one is the Taliban." It was heart-breaking.

The audience gets to know the members of the platoon as we see them fortifying their bases and joking around when they have some free time. For instance, one guy puts on some music and three others start dancing with him. But there are also those interviews. A guy named Pemble relates how he was raised by hippie parents and was never allowed to have toy guns. Yet there he is all grown up manning a machine gun.

Restrepo isn't a particularly political movie. There are neither politicians nor generals. It's just the guys in those boots on the ground. While I appreciate all of this, I'm still ambivalent about the movie. It paints a fine portrait of soldiers who put their asses on the line in the course of duty. They seem like everyday guys you'd meet on the street. But I was disappointed as there seems to be a lot more talking about combat than actual combat. Operation Rock Avalanche is described to us as a pretty big fuck-up yet we essentially only get to see a bit of the aftermath. I can't know where the cameras were when it all went down so perhaps there just isn't any footage of the ambush. But I left the theatre feeling that I wanted more of the cinema verite footage and less talking heads. Sure, combat footage gives you a visceral thrill, but it's a war we're talking about. Why so little? It's not that I'm against reflecting on events but I just found scenes where the soldiers do so in Afghanistan right after the events to have a bit more impact. For instance the one soldier who confesses after battle that he has no idea how he's going to deal with all this stuff back home. Now, for me, that confession just rang truer or seemed more potent to me because it was said there in Afghanistan instead of in Italy.

Despite all this, Restrepo was a very potent movie. The woman sitting a couple seats down from me had her hands to her mouth for most of the screening. It was nice to see our boys in Afghanistan get some recognition because they've been all but forgotten it seems. And while I feel that the movie wasn't able to balance talking head interviews with footage shot in the field perfectly, I still think that it gave good portraits of the people fighting the war over in Afghanistan and what is happening over there in our name.