Documentary Review: 'Restrepo'

Restrepo (2010)

Produced and Directed by: Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington

Cinematography by: Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington

Starring: The men of Battle Company, 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade

One platoon, one valley, one year

© 2010 Outpost Films/National Geographic Entertainment

The war in Afghanistan is the longest conflict in U.S, history. It has been going on for so long that it has had two distinct phases: Operation Enduring Freedom (2001-2014) and Operation Freedom's Sentinel (2015-present). Launched on October 7, 2001 as a response to the September 11 attacks on the U.S. by Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda terror group, its stated goals were to topple the harsh ultra-conservative Islamic regime known as the Taliban, capture or kill Bin Laden and his cohorts, and deny Al Qaeda a secure base of operations. It has been the largest military operation carried out by the NATO alliance (the 9/11 attacks activated the Alliance's Article Five, which states that any attack on a member country constitutes an attack on NATO's collective membership), and even in its current low-intensity combat/residual force phase, it's still very much an Allied effort.

Still, like most of America's post-World War II conflicts, the Afghanistan war might as well be taking place on Pluto for all the news coverage or portrayal in popular culture it receives. Every so often, there will be a news story from Kabul or Helmand or Bagram Air Base about the status of negotiations with the Taliban or a terrorist bombing against U.S. personnel, NATO support troops, or Afghan government officials or police officers. Other than that, nary a word about Freedom's Sentinel.

Filmmakers haven't exactly flooded the market with feature films about the war in Afghanistan. In 17 years of fighting, only a handful of movies - an odd mix of traditional war dramas (Lone Survivor, 12 Strong), dark comedies (Whiskey Tango Foxtrot), technothrillers (Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit retcons its titular character's career as a Marine Corps junior officer as having taken place during Enduring Freedom), and even a comic book superhero movie (Iron Man).

Documentarians have done better than their more mass-audience oriented pop culture film counterparts at bringing the war's realities to the home front. True, there aren't as many documentaries out there about American soldiers in Afghanistan as there are about Vietnam, say.

As with documentaries about the war in Vietnam, the tenor of documentaries about Operation Enduring Freedom depends on the makers' political slant. Filmmakers who are critics of George W. Bush (and later, Barack Obama) and American policy in the War on Terror will make docs like  Thomas Wallner's The Guantanamo Trap, a scathing account about four men whose lives were altered by their incarceration in Guantanamo Bay detention camps, or Ben Anderson's examination of a Marine unit's experiences as it trains Afghan soldiers and police officers to take over NATO forces' missions before the long-delayed Residual Force stage of the war begins.

Slightly less critical of the War on Terror, Restrepo is a 2010 film by journalist/filmmaker Sebastian Junger, who is best known for his book The Perfect Storm, and the late Tim Hetherington, a documentarian who died in 2011 while covering the Libyan Civil War that toppled Moammar Quadaffi. Filmed in 2007 while the Italy-based 173rd Airborne Brigade was in a 15-month-long deployment in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, Restrepo covers the war from the point of view of the "grunts" of Captain Dan Kearney's Battle Company during that deployment.

RESTREPO is a feature-length documentary that chronicles the deployment of a platoon of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley. The movie focuses on a remote 15-man outpost, "Restrepo," named after a platoon medic who was killed in action. It was considered one of the most dangerous postings in the U.S. military. This is an entirely experiential film: the cameras never leave the valley; there are no interviews with generals or diplomats. The only goal is to make the viewer feel as though they have just been through a 90-minute deployment. This is war, full stop. The conclusions are yours. -  DVD package blurb, Restrepo

My Take 

This documentary was, as I said earlier, made between 2007 and 2009, during a time when Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington were embedded with Capt. Dan Kearney's Battle Company in the Korangal on assignment with Vanity Fair. During their time with the unit, Junger and Hetherington shot unscripted footage of American soldiers as they go on patrols, endure hair-raising ambushes - including one in which Battle Company is attacked from every point in the compass -and firefights, and undergo the mind-numbing day-to-day existence of men at war.

The film takes its name from Private Juan Sebastian Restrepo, a combat medic who was born in Colombia in 1986 but moved to South Florida in 1993 with his divorced mother and brothers Ivan and Pablo. He eventually became a U.S. citizen and joined the Army in 2006 with plans to study medicine after his enlistment ended. Restrepo was then assigned to Battle Company as a platoon medic but died a few weeks after his unit arrived in the Korangal. Gregarious and popular with his buddies (he appears in a video shot on a train in Europe shortly before the deployment begins), Restrepo is not only memorialized by the name of Captain Kearney's remote outpost in the Taliban-infested valley, but also in the film's title.)

Restrepo alternates from footage shot in the Korengal before, during, and shortly after a perilous assignment code-named Operation Rock Avalanche to "after-deployment" interviews filmed in Italy with some of the soldiers in Battle Company, including its commanding officer (CO) Dan Kearney.  Of the few officers we see in Restrepo, all of whom are company- or field-grade ranks, Kearney is the most prominent; we see him not just leading his men in firefights or talking to them between missions to make sure they are okay, but also dealing with the Afghan residents of the Korangal in a never-ending attempt to win their hearts and minds.

This is not an easy film to watch. It is not a particularly bloody or graphically violent documentary, but it doesn't tiptoe lightly about the topics of war, death, and destruction. It is abundantly clear that the men of the platoon that Junger and Hetherington followed during their stint with Battle Company care deeply for each other; the impact of Private Restrepo's death early on is clearly obvious in his buddies' stories about him. The bond of men in war - a recurring theme in many books and movies about the topic - is real and can't easily be replicated by civilian life; as a result, the GIs - some of whom are barely out of their teens and early 20s in Restrepo - are part of that rare breed that Shakespeare once called a "band of brothers."

And although we see quite a few Afghan villages and their inhabitants in Restrepo (In his review of the film, the late Roger Ebert describes the elders that Kearney has weekly meetings with as "a group of men who could not look more aged, toothless and decrepit if they tried. A portrait of one would be all you needed to suggest the poverty of the region."), we never see the Taliban. Restrepo shows quite a few firefights, but the insurgent combatants are never onscreen. We see Battle Company's GIs react to ambushes and sudden bursts of gunfire while on patrol or during Rock Avalanche, The Taliban are like deadly ghosts; invisible but nevertheless present and lethally dangerous.

Junger and Hetherington take great pains to make Restrepo an apolitical documentary.  As the film's official website says:

The war in Afghanistan has become highly politicized, but soldiers rarely take part in that discussion. Our intention was to capture the experience of combat, boredom and fear through the eyes of the soldiers themselves. Their lives were our lives: we did not sit down with their families, we did not interview Afghans, we did not explore geopolitical debates. Soldiers are living and fighting and dying at remote outposts in Afghanistan in conditions that few Americans back home can imagine. Their experiences are important to understand, regardless of one's political beliefs. Beliefs are a way to avoid looking at reality. This is reality.

War, as Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman, is all hell, and the filmmakers of Restrepo try to show this as honestly and viscerally as possible without resorting to "war porn" footage of dead GIs or Taliban corpses. Even the company's most grievous loss, the death of Juan Sebastian Restrepo, occurs off-screen. But its impact is there, reflected in the survivors' words and body language.

Restrepo is hard to watch, but it's also a documentary that every adult American should watch, especially if he or she is engaging others in conversations about war and peace in the 21st Century.


Sources: Roger Ebert review of Restrepo, June 30, 2010

Official website for the film Restrepo