The modern war movie is a bit tricky. In the past, war movies often played up how America and her allies were always in the right and the enemy was often cruel, evil, or disposable. In more recent times, war movies try to walk the fine line of maybe criticizing the conflict without criticizing the men who end up fighting it.
The Outpost, the true story of a poorly-positioned US Army base in Afghanistan, manages to do that nicely.
Set in the mountains of Northern Afghanistan, the base in The Outpost is set in a deep valley surrounded by tall mountains. It’s obvious to anyone who lands there that this is a terrible place to set a military base as it isn’t hard to Taliban insurgents to simply shoot down from out of range of everything except the American mortars. As such, there are daily attacks on the outpost, small attacks that are usually beaten back without too much effort.
However, The Outpost takes its time setting things up. We see the initial Captain in charge of the post, played by Orlando Bloom, perhaps the biggest name in the movie, having success negotiating with local elders, but various incidents soon leave other, less qualified men in charge. Factor in as well that most of the first hour, showing daily life for the men of the base, may seem inconsequential in many ways, but it’s all there for a purpose, showing everything that went wrong leading to a sudden, violent turn of events at the movie’s halfway point. Warnings from both the local translator and more experienced NCOs are ignored by the higher-ups, and the insurgent attacks aren’t without their casualties. When the big attack at the end does occur, it is up to the professionalism and skills of the soldiers to keep themselves alive as they’re being overrun by fighters.
The first half, though important, is seemingly designed to throw the audience off. It seems like it could have come from any number of war movies where the theme seems to be the old Army axiom of “hurry up and wait”. However, every one of those scenes has a pay-off later in the movie. It just didn’t seem obvious to me at first. I’d say much of that is due to the fact that, in my own line of work, I do hear a lot of Army cliches and many of them seem to appear in the movie, and the rest comes from the fact these are a group of largely twentysomething young men, and they aren’t always the most mature people around. But when things go bad, these are professional soldiers who know what they’re doing. They won’t always get out of things alive, but the movie is there to, among other things, show the bravery and professionalism of some actual US soldiers, some of whom even appear in the movie. This was just a solid war movie, well worth the look I gave it off Netflix.
Grade: A-
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