The French have Camerone, the British Isandlwana, the Greeks Thermopylae, but Americans seem particularly enamored of heroic last stands, from the Alamo and Custer's Last Stand through the "Black Hawk Down" debacle in Somalia. Add a new name to that list: Operation Red Wings, where four Navy SEALs operating deep in Afghanistan's Hindu Kush were ambushed by a Taliban force about 10 times their number; they went down fighting, with only one man miraculously surviving to tell the tale.
That man was Marcus Luttrell, and his best-selling memoir "Lone Survivor" comes to the big screen as adapted by director Peter Berg. (Fortunately we get the Peter Berg who made war-on-terror thriller "The Kingdom" and not the one who made "Battleship.") Mark Wahlberg, Emile Hirsch, Taylor Kitsch and Ben Foster star as the SEAL team that gets hit, and they look credible enough to have passed muster with the actual SEALs who advised on the film.
War is hell, so they say, but some films make it look more so than others. "Lone Survivor" is one of the toughest war movies you'll ever see. It captures the bad-ass swagger and ruthless professionalism of the SEALs, for sure, but it also depicts a confused, desperate firefight with savage intensity. Some lefty critics have called it a glorification of war, but while there is heroism depicted, it's mostly of the sacrificial kind; about the last thing anyone would want to do after seeing this film is run off to a battlefield. Luttrell himself put it best in a TV interview where — when asked if the film was "pro-war" — he said, testily, "I don't even know what that means. There's nothing glorious about war, it's the most horrible thing in the world."