2010 Directed by Sebastian Junger, Tim Hetherington
Directors Hetherington and Junger spend a year with the 2nd Battalion of the United States Army located in one of Afghanistan's most dangerous valleys. The documentary provides insight and empathy on how to win the battle through hard work, deadly gunfights and mutual friendships while the unit must push back the Taliban.
Restrepo - In der Hölle Afghanistan, Un an au cœur des combats, Рестрепо, רסטרפו, Restrepo - Inferno in Afghanistan, 레스트레포, Wojna Restrepo, 雷斯特雷波, 當代啟示錄
USA
Sundance
USAR
AustraliaMA15+
Australia
USA
That feeling when you’re a third world country and the US arrives to “free you from evil”, but then decides to leave you alone because “freedom isn’t free”.
¨My personal low point? - Rock Avalanche, I saw a lot of professional tough guys go weak in the knees.¨
Restrepo is one of the five pictures nominated for Best Documentary at the Oscars and it also won the Grand Jury Prize in the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. It`s beautifully directed and filmed by Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger (writer of The Perfect Storm). The huge success of this film and what separates it from the hundreds of other war pictures is that Junger puts us right in the middle of the action without any political agenda. He simply decides to film these groups of soldiers who have been deployed to one of the most dangerous locations in Afghanistan and…
I read Sebastian Junger's Tribe back when it came out, and this Afghanistan War documentary has since intrigued me. Last night I took some time to check it out.
For those that don't know, the film traces the year that journalists Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington spent with several different deployments of troops in Afghanistan. Much of the documentary takes place in the Korengal Valley, which at the time was one of the, if not the most dangerous places to be deployed in Afghanistan. Junger and Hetherington make clear that their documentary is not "pro-war," but rather an attempt to realistically capture the day to day lives of the soldiers deployed that they spent time with.
Mixed vibes on this…
Interesting, but not particularly illuminating until the final caption tells you that the US withdrew from the Korengal Valley in 2010 and that nearly 50 US soldiers died there. It's unclear what, if anything, we accomplished in 14 years of combat operations, and this film has nothing to say about that one way or the other.
imagine making a documentary on the war in afghanistan that doesn't even dare to ask the question of why we're there in the first place.
there's some high quality footage in here - i was particularly interested in the interactions with local villagers. it's hard to believe the absurdity of these exchanges. it was illuminating to see just how poorly the captain negotiates with the elders. this guy is clearly making promises up on the spot and it's wild.
but no emotional room is made for the victims. the americans always get the last word, down to the final interviews where the meathead captain proudly claims victory because he dug a ditch halfway around the world.
bunch of kids sent to do the bidding of their corrupt governments. every country's got the same story..
Well done and depressing on multiple levels. So much cost and so little gained. The epitome of wasted resources. Human and everything else.
It's all about the close-ups here. They say it all.
The doc is filled with great, candid footage from Afghanistan (which is jarring sometimes because of how unfamiliar it seems, considering how long this war has been going on and how detached the footage shown on the news nomally feels). But this isn't a political or even anti-war movie. Not exactly. It's about THIS platoon of guys and how the experience of war affects them. It's about how they cope with and process it.
That's where the close-ups come in. The interviews here really are just talking heads, in the purest sense of the phrase. Sometimes the camera's so zoomed in that the whole frame is a face. This movie…
“Like, I had a toy squirt gun that was a turtle, and my parents took it away cuz it said ‘gun’ right there. ‘Squirt gun’.”
While there is a long tradition of war journalism, the access here to both the gunfights and the soldiers is remarkable. During the "confessional" sections, I couldn't help but be reminded of post-war examination Hell and Back Again. But that movie is slightly more pointed and political, while there's a bit more of a cinéma vérité approach in Restrepo. Here, one of the major takeaways is how young and inexperienced and lost all these soldiers are. It really hammers home that, at its heart, war is immature.
An unvarnished view of the war in afghanistan. You watch a bunch of well-meaning soldiers serve in an outpost in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. You see them struggle with the local insurgents and accidentally kill local civilians.
It's a pretty unflattering view of the conflict, and should be required viewing before you make up your mind on the merits, or otherwise, of continued presence in Afghanistan.
