restrepo

Soldiers are living and fighting and dying at remote outposts in Afghanistan in conditions that few Americans back home can imagine. Their experiences are important to understand, regardless of one’s political beliefs. Beliefs can be a way to avoid looking at reality. This is reality. — directors Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger, Restrepo press notes

Restrepo is a harrowing account of the war in Afghanistan, particularly for an audience that has been raised to view war-time violence as entertainment. We get the sense that the soldiers themselves have taken that mentality with them. They play first-person shooters before going out on patrol; they talk about graphic video-games as a boy's rite of passage. At the beginning, it seems like they view the war that way. Restrepo shows that that mentality is useless.

The wearying effect that their deployment has had on the troops who were at O.P. Restrepo is obvious. After the fact, they are unable to put into words the experiences of their 15-month tour. Coping with it has been difficult. It hasn't been like this since WWII or Vietnam, one soldier says; the Army doesn't know how to treat us. At the end, they are just ready to go home. There is the sense that the whole thing has been an exercise in futility. The victory has not been won; end title cards tell us that the U.S. pulled out of the Korangal in April 2010.

Restrepo is not an anti-war film. It is not blatantly condemning the U.S. military-industrial complex the way Why We Fight did. It is not disrespectful to the armed forces; rather, in some ways it heightens our respect for them, because they are willing to undergo these conditions. It gives us an unblinking look into the lives of ordinary soldiers, at what they are facing day-to-day. These are real-life challenges; these are the real-life effects the war is having on our soldiers. According to the synopsis given in the press notes,

This is an entirely experiential film: the cameras never leave the valley; there are no interviews with generals or diplomats. The only goal is to make viewers feel as if they have just been through a 94-minute deployment. This is war, full stop. The conclusions are up to you.

Restrepo has been called an apolitical film by its directors. The viewer should draw his own conclusions, they say. But Restrepo does make a powerful statement, intended or not: we don't understand what type of war we're fighting. We understand that the enemy, the "bad guys," are fighting for religious ideals, but we don't know how to counter that. The film drives that home powerfully as it shows the U.S. forces offering the people of the Korangal money, jobs, roads -- "progress," in the material sense. But our idea of "progress" is foreign to these people. They are fighting a religious war. Those who are not fighting have deep ties to those who are. Westernized "progress" is meaningless to them. That doesn't mean they won't take money or handouts, but money and handouts do not change the beliefs and ideals that are ingrained into them.

The reality of the war in the Middle East is unavoidably complex, even if you try to leave politics out of it. Restrepo shows that remarkably well; in fact, it does the best job of just about any modern war film in showing that. The Hurt Locker was excellent, but Restrepo is exceptional. It's not fiction. It feels raw and visceral. It feels like you are there. Consequently, the statement it makes is much more powerful.

Restrepo is rated R for language throughout, and descriptions of violence. It is never tastelessly graphic, but it is still intense — as it should be.