Ryan McNeil
I don’t want to waste words on trying to convince you.
I don’t want to spend time painting a picture you probably already know.
I want to say “Just see this movie” and be done with it.
…But that would be taking the easy way out, and the soldiers of OP Restrepo deserve better than that.
RESTREPO takes us to The Korangal Valley in Afghanistan. As one officer describes it, the Korangal Valley is “where the road ends”: everything ahead of this point is Taliban controlled. As such, this particular position has become an amazingly dangerous dispatch. It is here, where we meet 2nd Platoon, B Company, 2nd Batallion, 503rd Infantry regiment of the 173rd Airborne Brigade. We spend a year with these men – some of whom barely look old enough to shave – and learn first hand what it is to serve in such a dangerous forward area.
It doesn’t take long for the soldiers to size up the geography of Korangal. They’re surrounded by mountains, making any position in this valley only slightly better than that of a sitting duck. Knowing this full well, they still push forward in the dead of night to get a better position. In an act of equal parts bravery and defiance, the build a new outpost…something that required them to alternate digging in, and returning fire.
We learn about all of this from conversations with the men of the platoon, which is what makes this film stand out. The reporting of this story has been constructed by embedded journalists, but we never hear them speak a word. Nor are any senior officers, politicians, or strategists given an opportunity to offer their opinion. RESTREPO gives us a year in the life of one platoon…and is told to us by the soldiers of that platoon.
A clue about the sort of men that make up this platoon can be found in the name of the outpost. Once they fortify this position, they decide to name it after their platoon medic who was killed – PFC Juan Restrepo. It’s this sort of loyalty to one another that makes these men the best at what they do, and deserving of our unwavering respect and admiration. I for one don’t think I could ever deal with seeing one of my closest friends killed. These men grieve in record time, erect the positional equivelant of a middle finger at their enemy…and name it after their fallen brother.
Watching these soldiers tell this story evokes pride and sadness all at the same time. Pride in the fact that they are off defending our way of life while many others their age are flipping burgers…sadness at the fact that we in the allied forces seem poised to abandon the mission. Thinking about the fate of this mission, and overlaying it on to the faces of the men who told me this story might very well make this one of the saddest films I’ve ever seen.
War stories have been thrown at us in abundance over the last ten years, and I wish I could say that the wave was close to breaking…but I don’t think any of us see that as the case. With it’s honest tack, RESTREPO elevates to become one of the most enlightening of the war stories we’ve been told. Likewise, it is perhaps the greatest tribute to the men and women serving in Afghanistan yet.
Many times this summer, I’ve urged readers to look a little harder, drive a little further, and chase down the summer films that are truly worthy of our time and money. It’s pretty safe to say that RESTREPO would be a film to add to that chase…and perhaps to put it at the top of the stack.