'Lone Survivor':Bad mission, good movie

IN "FORREST GUMP," the title character stands to give a speech on the Washington Mall, and his mic is cut.

His speech goes on, but no one hears it - Robert Zemeckis' metaphor for the stifled voices of the men fighting the war at the time.

It's a thread picked up again by Peter Berg in "Lone Survivor," a brutal account of a doomed Navy SEAL mission in Afghanistan, based on the memoir of Marcus Luttrell (Mark Wahlberg), obviously the man in the title.

After a brief intro and quick sketches of the men as individuals, Marcus' squad is air-dropped atop a remote mountain, where they spy upon a "high-value" Taliban leader, looking down his village redoubt with telephoto lenses, blending into the tree line. (Berg's sense of place, the geography of the subsequent battle, is expert).

They're meant to check in via satellite radio, but the looming mountains make links impossible, and their repeated entreaties to be picked up via helicopter are heard back at base camp as crackling noise, garbled language.

And so they are left there, alone, isolated, vulnerable - affirming initial fears that the mission had "too many moving parts."

"Lone Survivor" is a straightforward war movie, a simple account of a combat mission, but the situation resonates - fighting men asking to be extracted from an untenable situation, but no one is listening.

Untenable because they've been spotted by hostile civilians, whom they capture and hold. The four SEALs (also Emile Hirsch, Ben Foster, Taylor Kitsch) debate: kill the civilians and live, or release them and be set upon by the enemy, meaning almost certain death.

The SEALs go with option B and are soon attacked by a large force of fighters armed with machine guns, assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades. The SEALs only hope: Retreat down the face of a sheer cliff.

It's a brutal sequence. Berg makes it a point to show every gaping wound, protruding bone, bullet impact. You hear the thud of flesh on rock, the wind knocked from lungs. You see Americans executed point-blank. (You also see Berg redo the Willem Dafoe death scene from "Platoon," which perhaps explains why the showy, slo-mo sequence seems to belong in another picture).

What, you might ask, is the point? I think it emerges in the epilogue, when Berg shows us the flag-draped coffins of Luttrell's comrades stateside, and we recall that these were images that some in government did not want us see.

Berg makes sure there is no looking away. From the images, from their implication: you send guys on campaigns like this one, you present them with impossible moral quandaries, this is what happens, and this is often how they come home.

Unless, like Marcus, you're plum lucky. He survives his vertical retreat, but only by the good graces of an Afghan local who hates the Taliban, perhaps seeing Luttrell as the enemy of his enemy.

Although not part of this movie's story, Luttrell later returned the favor and removed the endangered Afghan and his family to Texas.

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