Dirk Diggler stars as real life badass Marcus Luttrell in the story of the men who sacrificed everything during Operation Red Wings. BUD/S. Email. Morning run. Spilled coffee. Debrief. The Incredible Bana. Awesome fuckin' dancing. Fuckin' Jamiroquai. Marky Mark's trucker hat. No muff is too tough. Turtle without Johnny Drama. Rick fuckin' James. A cool as fuck goat. Surprise party. High-tech phone. FUBAR. Tango down! CQC. RPG. DYNO-mite! Hard fall. Sore toe. Grenade launcher. Frogman fuckin' toughness. Dirt-Aid. Motherfuckin' rocks. Fuck you shitty comms! Pure fuckin' adrenaline. Exploding Choppa. A friend when you least expect it. Search party. Party fuckin' crashers. Lucky ducky. Water bottle. Village fuckin' warfare. Knife fight. A cool kid. The big guns. Red smoke. The final…

Better than expected might be damning the film with faint praise but it is still an accurate reflection of my feelings towards Peter Berg’s bruising true life story. Following a series of cinematic blunders (culminating in the spectacularly woeful Battleship), Lone Survivor is a step in the right direction for Berg even though it is still far from a great film.

The film is based on Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell’s account of the calamitous Operation Red Wings - a dangerous mission to capture and kill notorious Taliban leader, Ahmad Shah, in Afghanistan in 2005. If the spoiler-filled title didn’t already make it obvious, Marcus and his team of four are left to fight for their lives in the unforgiving Afghan…

What are earlobes for anyway?
-Shane Patton

Probably the most disturbing part of Lone Survivor is realizing that the shallow caricatures displayed on screen is the best Peter Berg could come up with through his directing and writing in representing very real Navy SEALs. It's not a matter of whether or not you believe them to be heroes and deserving of something better, it's a matter of this being a story about real people and having more detail put into their brutal deaths then making any attempt at making any of them feel real.

Honestly if the film was an entire work of fiction it would have been panned by critics as a violent propaganda film. We have had too…

I have nothing but respect for soldiers who are willing to risk life and limb, be it for their own country or the freedom of others. I'm getting the feeling director Berg doesn't share that sentiment.

There is some interesting potential in this film that is never met in any way. It seems to want to say something about brotherhood and the close connection these marines have to each other. For that, they have to become humans to us. That just never happens, I have played first person shooters with characters that had more humanity and depth to them than these completely interchangeable soldiers.

I know, I know, this is a movie set in Afghanistan, based on a true story,…

Music for your reading pleasure (as suggested by Danny)

"I don't go home, you don't go home."

Lone Survivor is the type of movie that works better in hindsight. When I watched it a few nights ago, there were so many problems with it that my overall opinion just became a bit clouded after awhile. Now, thinking back on it, I realize that there's a pretty good experience at the movie's core; it might just even be a great experience.

The movie is based off of the real life "Operation Red Wings" mission, where four soldiers were sent into the heart of Afghanistan to track down a Taliban leader named Ahmad Shah and perform reconnaissance on him. The whole operation…

Based on the nonfiction book of the same name & set during the War in Afghanistan, Lone Survivor tries to recreate the US Navy SEALs' Operation Red Wings; a failed mission in which a survey team of 4 soldiers were tasked to locate the Taliban leader, Ahmad Shah. And even though it impresses in parts & has a lot in it to evoke the patriotic response from its target audience (which is only American viewers obviously), Lone Survivor ends up going completely overboard in dramatizing the true events & suffers from the very clichés that most films of its genre find themselves trapped in.

What's right with this film is Peter Berg's dynamic visual direction, tense atmosphere, superb pacing, intense battle sequences, precision…

Mediocrity is so often affiliated with films such as these. It's one thing to shoot a war film, and most proficient directors are able to do so, but it's another to utilize the inimitable perspective on humanity which the genre so bountifully bestows upon the maker. Films of warfare frequently reject the eye-opening themes that made such interpretations from virtuosos like Stone, Malick, Eastwood or Coppola so harrowing and instead take a more superficial and indistinctive route. It's a shame, but every now and again a film comes along that successfully mimics the effectiveness of the undisputed supreme war movies.

Lone Survivor is most certainly one of these films. Anticipating the disagreeable qualities aforementioned, I was instead taken aback by…