What I Watched -- Restrepo

I watched this movie with K recently - last week maybe.  But even though it was good, I'm not at all enthused to write the review.  I think it's because there's not much to say about the movie.  It just is.  But since I've left you all hanging lately, here it goes...

Restrepo won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, though it lost out in the Best Documentary Feature category at this year's Academy Awards to Inside Job. Restrepo is the story of Second Platoon, Battle Company, 173rd Airborne Brigade, and their 15-month tour of duty in the Korangal Valley in Afghanistan.  Filmmakers Tim Hetherington (who was recently killed while covering the conflict in Libya) and Sebastian Junger (best known for his book The Perfect Storm about the collision of subtropical and extratropical storms and the fishermen caught in the middle) embedded with the soldiers to film their lives.

I was going to say "...embedded with the soldiers to tell their stories," but that's not quite accurate.  I've heard the phrase cinéma vérité associated with this movie, and that's true insofar as the subjects tell the story, with some poking and prodding from the filmmakers. The film conveys most of what you'd expect out of any war movie:
- Fear: "Nobody's going to help you.  You're in no man's land"
- Machismo
- Brotherhood: "That's all you got; you got the guy to your left and your right, and that's it."
- The impossibility of the situation
- Duty and pride: "A normal person would say [bravery]'s going above and beyond the call.  Well that is our call.  Why call us brave?  It's our job to be that way.  So, that's who we are.  We're not doing anything extra that they seem to think we are.  We're doing what's asked of us, and we do it well."

But it may be exactly that cinéma vérité that make it hard for me to get into this movie.  I just wasn't enthralled by the story the way I am by some movies.  I was always very aware that I was sitting on the couch and watching a DVD; I never fell into the story to the extent that my surroundings disappeared.

The film and the outpost the men occupy in the Korangal are named for Doc Restrepo, one of their number who died early in their tour.  Perhaps the most poignant moment came when the men lit flares in honor of Doc, and each man looks into the camera and remembers the man.  The moment highlights the difficulty of the situation - the emotional trauma the soldiers face coupled with their limited ability to deal with it.

One thing that was immensely irritating about Restrepo is that the sound editing was incredibly uneven.  For the entire movie, K and I were reaching for the remote: volume up, down, up, down.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

Bottom line: a story worth telling and witnessing, but not something you'll lose yourself in.