Movie Review

12 Strong: Film Review

/ Peter Martuneac / 4 Comments

I don’t typically watch movies about war, not anymore. It was one of my preferred genres as a 17 and 18 year old. Movies such as Black Hawk Down, We Were Soldiers, Letters From Iwo Jima. I’d seen them several times.

I then joined the Marines and participated in a war. Over in Afghanistan, I experienced the combat I’d only seen in movies and in video games, and that completely killed any taste I had for the genre. I can count on one hand the number of war movies I’ve watched since then and have fingers left over. I decided to break with tradition this week and watch 12 Strong, and that ended up being a good (and bad) decision.

This movie called to me in a way others just don’t, probably because it’s about the very war I fought in. Most modern war films are based on experiences from Iraq. Afghanistan, the new ‘forgotten war’, doesn’t get much attention. Perhaps because it wasn’t the kind of war Americans like to hear about very much, with its guerilla warfare, invisible enemies, and precious few glorious triumphs.

The movie is based on the true story of ODA 595 (Operational Detachment Alpha), a group of 12 Special Forces soldiers who were the first American troops into Afghanistan after the 9/11 terror attacks. They are assigned what is considered by many a suicide mission: to link up with an Afghan warlord and help him drive the Taliban out of a key stronghold in northern Afghanistan. These soldiers aided the Afghans in combat, both directly with their rifles and indirectly by calling in massive airstrikes.

Because they were alone in a hostile country, these Special Forces soldiers got around the same way many Afghans did at the time: on horseback. Thus was born their legendary nickname, the horse soldiers.

The movie unfolds in a fairly typical, predictable manner, and in that respect it wasn’t terribly good. There are no real surprises here. What I did enjoy was the overall accuracy and true to life portrayals of military life. The Special Forces soldiers who were actually part of the mission were brought on to advise the team, which was obvious to me as I watched it. The lingo, the mannerisms, the behavior, it all clicked. I said, “These are definitely grunts.”

The acting was also superb. Chris Hemsworth, Michael Shannon, Geoff Stults, Rob Riggle (who portrayed the soldier he once actually worked for during his time in the military), Michael Pena, and William Fichtner in particular all did amazing jobs bringing these real heroes to life on the silver screen, and the rest of the cast deserves a bow, too.

Navid Negahban as General Dostum was magnificent. The final lines for his character, when he speaks of Afghanistan as the graveyard of empires, really tied the whole movie together. There are no right choices here. This is Afghanistan, graveyard of many empires. Today you are our friend; tomorrow you are our enemy.

But I think what makes this movie about the Afghanistan war work is that it’s one of the few battles in the entire war that Americans would like to see in a movie: clearly drawn battle lines, enemies flying their flags vs good guys flying their flags, infantry and cavalry charges against artillery, and an ultimate triumph, a flag-raising over a defeated enemy. As aforementioned, such moments in Afghanistan were few and far between.

I recommend this one to any fans of war movies, or to folks who are interested in learning more about the war in Afghanistan. For a war film, the cursing isn’t bad and there’s no gory or over-the-top violent deaths, but of course there are killings by gunfire and explosions, and so the particularly squeamish may want to pass.

I myself enjoyed it, but all it did was confirm that war movies are no longer for me, especially not movies about Afghanistan. To sit there and watch the evil deeds of these Taliban terrorists, murdering a woman for daring to teach girls how to read, executing a man for listening to music, stoning another woman to death for not wearing her veil. Make no mistake, the US military may not be a perfect organization, and we’ve made our own mistakes, but the Taliban are pure evil. They hate you, whoever you are, and would slit your throat without a second thought.

And now those wicked men are back in charge. They won. Evil defeated good, darkness swallowed the light. It’s like if The Lord of the Rings ended with Frodo captured by a Nazgul and the Ring returns to Sauron.

It kills me to admit it, to know the most primal, visceral act I ever engaged in, the act of war, was for naught. We won every battle, but those bastards won the war. So much blood spilt, bombs dropped and bullets fired, lives lost and families ripped apart, all of it, for nothing. Nothing has changed. The Taliban rule, and the Afghan people suffer.

I don’t believe I’ll be watching any more such movies. It’s just too painful for me, and it left me depressed for a few days. It took me until today to finally write up a review though I watched the film on Tuesday. But again, for the rest of you, I do recommend it. It’s a story that deserves to be told and to be heard.

Movie Review: Oppenheimer

/ Peter Martuneac / 8 Comments

On Saturday, I spent a little over 3 hours at the movie theater with a friend, finally watching the widely-acclaimed Oppenheimer. It did not disappoint.

Okay, well, it disappointed a little. The beginning was very much a mess, in my opinion. Flashbacks of flashbacks, changing from color to black-and-white, moving from young Oppenheimer to an old, and there was precious little thread holding these scenes together. The infamous apple scene, in which Oppenheimer attempts to poison a mean professor but eventually thwarts his own plan after guilt overwhelms him, felt forced. I believed the director was trying to demonstrate the depths of Oppenheimer’s chaotic personality (by using an even that those close to the man claim never happened), but it came just a few minutes into the movie, after just one interaction with the intended victim, so it didn’t carry any weight.

The plot twist toward the end was also a little messy. There were so many major characters involved with names barely used that when the antagonist mentioned a couple by name as conspirators, I couldn’t quite remember who he was even talking about.

But aside from those grips and a couple other petty ones, I really enjoyed the film. Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer and Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Straus were simply brilliant. Emily Blunt also gave a masterful performance of Oppenheimer’s wife. None of these characters are very sympathetic, as they are all deeply flawed and selfish individuals, but the actors still did a tremendous job bringing them to life.

The scene of the Trinity test was one of my favorites, as Christopher Nolan did a tremendous job building up the pressure, including the actual countdown for the atomic blast. A little later, following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there is a scene where a deeply conflicted Oppenheimer delivers a congratulatory speech for the scientists who worked in the Manhattan Project where Nolan’s artistic vision was once again on full display with the combination of sounds and lighting.

I highly recommend this one for anyone with a taste for history. It doesn’t feel like a full 3 hours, and the resulting performance is well worth the time and money anyway. It wasn’t quite the cinematic coup de grace I was hoping, but I still give it a solid 4.5 out of 5 stars. Easily the best movie I’ve seen all year.

Movie Review: “F.U.B.A.R.” on Netflix

/ Peter Martuneac / 4 Comments

I hate how much this will sound like the ‘old man yells at clouds’ meme, but I generally don’t enjoy most of the movies or TV shows coming out these days. But I was searching for something new to watch and I’m a big fan of Arnold Schwarzenegger, so when his face appeared on Netflix with a new show called F.U.B.A.R., I decided to give it a try.

The premise is pretty simple: Arnold is a badass CIA agent on the verge of retirement, only to be pulled back in when he discovers his daughter is also a badass CIA agent currently working a dangerous undercover mission. Through eight 57-minute episodes, the father-daughter duo hunt down a violent arms dealer trying to steal and sell a nuclear suitcase.

Actually, one of my first thoughts as I watched the show was that it felt like a parody of Zach and Abby in an alternate universe, one where zombies had not risen from the dead and where the father-daughter team could have led happy, fulfilling lives.

That bemusing comparison kept me roped in during the first couple of episodes, when I still wasn’t too sure what to make of the show. The daughter has a lot of problems with Arnold’s character, who was largely an absent father because of his job, and at first it seemed like the entire show would be her just dumping on her dad over and over, leaving Arnold as the constant sap and butt of the joke. That’s not the kind of show I have any desire to watch.

Fortunately, as the show progresses, each character gets their turn to be the wise old owl, the one who is right and who everyone else should have listened to at the beginning of the episode. Every character also plays the goat at least once, the one whose shortcomings create chaos and makes everyone else have to work harder to finish the mission and get back home in one piece.

I will say that I’m not a fan of the way it ended. There is clearly going to be a second season based on the events of the final episode in Season 1, but that to me feels like too much. The way this mostly delightful action-comedy progressed, it felt like one season was the best fit for it. But I understand that dollars drive projects more than storytelling.

Overall, I can say that I recommend this show to anyone with a Netflix account and who doesn’t mind quite a bit of cursing. There’s no nudity and though there is violence there’s nothing terribly gruesome. So check it out! But before you do, I must conclude the review with a quote from the show’s final episode, spoken by Arnold in his gruff, Austrian voice. It was a great line, no two ways about that, but I’m also purely including this for the benefit (detriment?) of one Berthold Gambrel:

“I’ll be fine. I’m just going to kick back, and drink some beers with Napoleon, Thomas Dewey, the Buffalo Bills, and all the other great losers in history.”

Movie Review: The Lighthouse

/ Peter Martuneac / 9 Comments

I’m usually not one to watch artsy movies made by dictator-directors, but my brother gave me a DVD of The Lighthouse and said I had to watch it. Plus it stars Willem Defoe, and I’m up to watch anything with Willem Defoe.

The premise of the movie is simple: two men are put on a desolate rock far from shore to man a lighthouse for four weeks, and they slowly lose their grip on reality. As a matter of fact, except for a few frames featuring a mermaid and an apparition, Defoe and Robert Pattinson are the only actors in this film.

My brother was right to call this an ‘experience’. The overall tone of the film was weird as the two men descended into madness, and it was easy to see that the director had a very specific vision. Like he wanted to make an explicit statement about the human psyche that only he could have dreamed of. When the movie was over, I half expected him to be in the corner, arms folded across his chest, and a smug ‘now do you see?’ grin.

For instance, there’s some scenes that just felt, you know, gratuitous. Like an entire two minutes of Pattinson’s character furiously masturbating to a wooden carving of a mermaid (nothing explicit is shown here). That’s just something that I could have lived without seeing.

Or the flashes of Pattinson’s character having sex with a mermaid. And not a harmless, Disney-fied version of a mermaid, but the actual deadly monster that sailors once feared. There was a ton of sexual overtones and scenes in this, which as aforementioned are surely all meant to make some kind of statement on the human psyche that only an artistic genius could have imagined.

And despite the length of the film (1 hour, 49 minutes) somehow it jumped into the thick of the plot too quickly. There was no grace period of the men still being normal, as almost immediately one of them began having visions and exhibiting signs of madness. Like they were mad before they even came to the island.

Oh, and the whole movie is shot in black and white.

As for the acting itself, Pattinson and Defoe knocked it out of the park. They are phenomenal actors and they gave a truly magnetic performance. But the movie itself was just really weird, it felt preachy but I wasn’t even sure what was being preached to me, and long.

So I can’t really recommend this one unless, as my brother described it, you’re in the mood for an ‘experience’.

Movie Review: Seven Kings Must Die

/ Peter Martuneac / Leave a comment

At long last, the hit Netflix series The Last Kingdom, an adaptation of the Saxon Stories book series by Bernard Cornwall, has come to an end. Seven Kings Must Die is a 2-hour movie that encompasses the final three books, differing from the show where one or two books at most would be the focus of an entire season of episodes.

My first thought is that this was a poor choice. I don’t read Hollywood news, so maybe there were budgetary concerns or perhaps some of the main actors wouldn’t commit to two or three more seasons of work, so they chose this out of necessity. But the two-hour timespan made for a story that felt rushed.

For example, an entire book in the series, the eleventh is completely glossed over, with just some few elements taken and sprinkled throughout the movie. Now this book felt like a lot of fluff to begin with, so maybe it’s not the worst idea, but the twelfth book, a far more pivotal entry in the series, was done in about ten minutes on screen and rather poorly. The English king is made out to be a psychotic, borderline-sociopathic murderer who is drunk with power, a complete distortion of the character in the books. The grand battle that cemented the king’s claim to the throne was watered down to a war of words at London’s gate.

Even the final, climactic Battle of Brunanburh felt less climactic. The battle in the books is built up for quite a few chapters, as the hopeless position of the English king is revealed, and negotiations to buy time drag on. In the movie, you get the sense that the enemy army has the advantage, but their victory does not seem so assured as it does in the books.

The ending of the movie was okay, though I won’t give any spoilers here.

All in all, it felt to me that both the books and the Netflix adaptation went too long. The series should have ended once Uhtred, the main character, reclaimed his lordship over Bebbanburg, since having it stolen from him as a child was the start of his character’s story arc and his all-consuming obsession throughout the first 10 books. Eventually, it all got a little stale.

If you’ve read the books and you’re dying to see for yourself how they were adapted, you should watch Seven Kings Must Die with an open mind. If you’ve only seen the show, my recommendation would be to ignore the movie since the final episode of The Last Kingdom was, in my opinion, a good ending for Uhtred of Bebbanburg.