A review of the 2013 film “Lone Survivor”
In the summer of 2005, Operation Red Wings was an attempt to take out a Taliban leader in Afghanistan mounted by a team of four Navy SEALs. It is not a spoiler – check out the title of the film – to explain that only one of the SEALs made it alive. He was Marcus Luttrell who in 2007 wrote an account of the operation in a work with a title borrowed by the 2013 film written and directed by Peter Berg. And it is hardly a spoiler to set out that, in the cinematic version of the story, Luttrell is played by the best-known actor in the cast Mark Wahlberg.
Luttrell has been challenged as a not entirely reliable witness and the film is not a straight adaptation of the book, but essentially this is a true story of remarkable heroism. What it lacks in characterisation or plot, it makes up for with blistering action. The only other movie that represents a firefight in such realistic terms is “Black Hawk Down’ which likewise was an American military intervention abroad that went terribly wrong.
Details of Operation Red Wings click here