REVIEW - LONE SURVIVOR

You might as well watch an American flag flying for two hours as watch Peter Berg's Lone Survivor, not least for the fact that both would be equally interesting. It undoubtedly is not the best advertisement for the US military, but it undoubtedly is the most zealous, and most sickening tribute to them. A crass, stupid, unimaginatively-made exercise in extreme jingoism, this sexist and racist enterprise features a number of sexist, racist and homophobic brutes getting into some perilous circumstances and suffering so that they might be lauded as heroes by a closing montage that made my eyes water with fury. Four young, white, tough, attractive men take to the Afghan mountains to murder some sand niggers - none of their victims are named in the film, nor presented as any more than brief brown blurs in front of the camera lens in the film's interminable gunfight sequences. I was not weaned, as a child, on violent video games, and so have no interest in elongated passages of gunfire and shouting on the soundtrack accompanied by various shades of greige whizzing past my eyes, and all for the purpose of watching state-sponsored massacre. These poor fellows are beatified by Berg's direction for grazing their cheekbones, and afforded grand, stoic demises at the hands of these faceless foreigners. Sure, this all happened, to some extent, though it's not only possible but also of greater value to the plot to produce a more balanced view on combat, rather than this aggressively pro-West, pro-violence stance (in a film whose very existence perpetuates the pro-male attitude of contemporary filmmaking, and the culture of intolerance that is unwittingly extolled at a number of points herein). And a slick studio production based on a novelised, subjective account of events some eight and a half years ago? How certain can one be that, indeed, this all happened?