Restrepo is a documentary about the U.S. Army post of the same name in Afghanistan, front line for the hottest zone of the war. The tagline for the movie: “One platoon. One valley. One year.” Unfortunately, as much as I wanted to like this documentary, the film just fell flat for me.
So what happened?
Two things: First, there were scenes that seemed staged. Not in the sense that the whole project was a hoax or anything, but like the soldiers and the film crew had planned scenes to be filmed. Perhaps it was a flaw in editing, for not showing us enough scenes of the same things to make it look natural for the camera to have “just happened” to catch a particular event in that particular way, or for those guys to be behaving in that particular way. Whether these were attempts at creative filming or genuine “hey, we didn’t get this, can y’all reenact it for us?” moments, I don’t know. Either way, the film lost the true documentary feel somewhere, and that made the whole story less impactful.
Second, there was no story. Except instead of making the story of the movie that there was no story, the film was edited together in a way that tried really hard to make a story. So it was kind of boring, but not intentionally boring. Like, if the movie had been the equivalent of The Onion’s satire on Modern Warfare, I’d have been okay with that. I don’t mind a boring film if the intention is to show how mind-numbing a part of someone else’s experience really is. So for me, “One unit, one day” would have worked much better, even if on that day nothing whatsoever happened.
Instead of what feels like a depiction of a typical day for this unit, I got a disjointed feature that is trying to force a narrative but doesn’t really have a theme to hang its plot points on. I walked away from it vaguely confused about what I was supposed to take away from the experience; I don’t feel like I have a clear view of what daily life is like for these men in this environment, and I don’t think after watching it I could summarize “what happened” any better than the tag line already did. I saw a lot of action, but at the same time, if that was all the action for their deployment then why was there so much of it crammed into these 90 minutes instead of showing a more realistic ratio of action to non-action?
This film was not as bad as it could have been, I will say that for it. It seemed to come at the subject with the straightforward documentary approach; I didn’t get the feeling there was an agenda behind the editing to make me feel a certain way about the war or those soldiers or our military or the people we’re fighting. I appreciated that quite a lot, given that most war movies are so blatantly anti-war (and often anti-military, as well) and that it’s a complex issue each person should be evaluating for him/herself, not being preached to from the heat of some filmmaker’s bias.
Unfortunately for this little movie, I think in terms of depictions of this type of combat environment, the first 25 minutes of The Hurt Locker convey it just as well. Even if that movie then proceeds to drop off the deep end of what-the-fuckery, it’s still more interesting to watch than Restrepo to someone who’s not obsessively fascinated by a “10 most exciting moments of a 15-month deployment” style montage. And Jarhead conveys the sense of boredom and malaise among soldiers stationed in a modern combat waiting game better.
Bottom line: I didn’t want to walk out of the movie, but it was not as moving or as memorable as it should have been based on the premise. I place the blame squarely on a muddled view of what the narrative of Restrepo Outpost is (or isn’t) on the part of the film’s producers.
