One of the soldiers included in the war documentary “Restrepo” says, months after the combat action in the film has ended, that he prefers not to sleep, if possible. If he’s not asleep, then he can’t have dreams.
The audience for this raw movie might feel the same way. Shot over the course of a year by experienced journalists (first-time filmmakers) Sebastian Junger and Tim Hethertington, “Restrepo” attempts an entirely neutral, fly-on-the-wall approach to depicting a pocket of the war in Afghanistan.
The place is the Korengal (also spelled Korangal) Valley, a mountainous region not far from the Pakistan border, which doesn’t look like the customary desert scrub of much war reportage. According to the film, it is one of the most dangerous postings in the war.
Junger and Hetherington took their video cameras and made five visits (each a month long) to the site between May 2007 and June 2008, the length of battle duty for the 173rd Airborne Brigade at Korengal.
There is no narration for the film, although the soldiers are occasionally seen in their post-duty interviews, recalling the hardship and tedium and camaraderie that made up their stint.
The film itself is somewhat repetitive at first — perhaps intentionally? — as we see the rituals of life. Skirmishes come and go, without apparent strategic gains or losses (though lives are lost — the company names its new outpost Restrepo for a well-liked soldier killed early in the deployment), and negotiations are made with local authorities.
A farmer’s dead cow becomes an issue, and the lack of satisfactory conclusion to the incident is a parable of short-sightedness — one of those tiny, unimportant things that seem to represent larger strategic problems.
One central battle is described by the soldiers without footage, although we then witness the traumatic aftermath. These scenes — of sudden death, the realization of it and the nakedly emotional responses of men in the moment — are images not commonly witnessed on movie screens.
The pep talk that follows, where the platoon’s captain urges his guys to use their anger over their losses to go out and kill more of the enemy, is presented without editorial emphasis. To some it might be as inspirational as countless such scenes have been in fictional war movies. To others it might be a hollow call to continue expensively rolling a stone up a hill even if the stone will roll right back down to the bottom again.
Either way, see the movie. It will bring home the realities for (and the toll on) the very human people sitting in war zones right now.
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