Rod Lurie
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Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
influenced The Outpost (2020)
Visuals Themes
Instead, what audiences are offered is something more akin to the first 20 minutes of 1998’s Saving Private Ryan extended over the entire runtime.
After all, the last few years have seen a number of films that have offered viewers recreations of various post 9/11 military endeavors that have presented themselves as powerful tributes to the troops who fought and died but which have turned out to be little more than films combining the dramatic subtlety of a WWII-era potboiler and a gore quotient rivaling the Normandy sequence from “Saving Private Ryan” that seem to exist for no other reason than to let Mark Wahlberg feed his savior complex on someone else’s dime.
There have not been such intense ground-floor war sequences like this maybe "Saving Private Ryan," which is high-praise for the sound mixing, editing, costume and set design, and cinematography found in "The Outpost."
Instead, it’s what you might get if you slammed together the heroics of “Saving Private Ryan” and the you-are-there intimacy of “1917” with the invaders-at-the-gates fears of “Assault on Precinct 13.”
The Outpost's harrowing climax is akin to the carnage of Saving Private Ryan's beach invasion.
There is an immersive verisimilitude to Rod Lurie's "The Outpost," a wrenching war thriller that has absorbed the lessons of documentaries like Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington's "Restrepo" as well as Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" and Stone's "Platoon," which it resembles less in form than in effect.
December 19, 2001 -- "The Last Castle" (U.K. title is "The Tower") is a fairly standard prison drama, along the lines of the 1965 prison drama "The Hill," but with a slight twist: it is also about a war game.
On the other hand, it works nicely as prison drama, avoiding most of the more obvious and cliched scenes of the genre, and cleverly weaving in elements of -- and paying tribute to -- such classics as Sidney Lumet's "The Hill" and David Lean's "The Bridge on the River Kwai."
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
Directed by David Lean
influenced The Last Castle (2001)
Plot Themes
Instead, he's chosen a comfortable blend of "Dead Poets Society" and "The Bridge on the River Kwai", which casts him as an irresistibly charismatic court-martialled general, facing off against a blinkered, cruel system.
On the other hand, it works nicely as prison drama, avoiding most of the more obvious and cliched scenes of the genre, and cleverly weaving in elements of -- and paying tribute to -- such classics as Sidney Lumet's "The Hill" and David Lean's "The Bridge on the River Kwai."
Colonel Winter has building materials brought in so the prisoners can build a stone wall in the yard — the wall itself serves no purpose, but building it is something to do and it’s constructive (calling to mind The Bridge on the River Kwai).
The brazenly derivative screenplay credited to David Scarpa and Graham Yost recycles elements from Cool Hand Luke, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and even The Bridge on the River Kwai while spinning a briskly entertaining yarn about rebellion and redemption in a maximum-security military prison.
The indolent script labors all over the place in the way it owes its nod to countless other flicks ranging from Redford's own "Brubaker" to "Stalag 17".
While this is a pretty standard prison drama plot structure ("Stalag 17," "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," etc.), it eventually changes to a war game plot.
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
influenced The Outpost (2020)
Dialogue Themes
Its early stages reminded me of “Apocalypse Now,” with the soldiers enjoying “bantz” amid the bullets.
Now, I’m not saying that it’s up there with the likes of Saving Private Ryan or even Apocalypse Now.
The overall experience of watching The Outpost isn’t akin to that of a Platoon or an Apocalypse Now .
Minus the absurd ironies of “Catch-22,” the hallucinatory madness of “Apocalypse Now,” the clockwork precision of “Dunkirk” or the existential grimness of the recently rereleased 1985 Soviet film “Come and See,” there is something missing about “The Outpost.”
We Were Soldiers, Hacksaw Ridge, Lone Survivor — their soldiers may be brave or weak, gung ho or skeptical, stoned or not, but they do their duty.
Screenwriters Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson come to the assignment having previously collaborated on two Mark Wahlberg movies, “The Fighter” and “Patriots Day,” although it’s another of Wahlberg’s true-story projects, the Afghanistan-set “Lone Survivor” (in which they had no part), that “The Outpost” most resembles.
Berg and Wahlberg themselves made a true-story Afghan War movie with 2013’s Lone Survivor, and while The Outpost is less bombastic, it’s also less distinctive.
The Outpost is a reasonably strong war film, probably the best feature film made to date about the war in Afghanistan (although, compared to Lone Survivor, 12 Strong, and War Machine, the competition isn’t exactly stiff.
The jingoistic kind are not only bad (Lone Survivor, American Sniper), they exacerbate the toxic notion of American exceptionalism.
The Last Castle, in other words, is a scene-by-scene retelling of Jules Dassin's classic prison drama Brute Force, except The Last Castle isn't making a worthy statement about resisting the Nazi state.
Also concerned in the furore were The Devils and two films attacked for allegedly glorifying fascistic vigilante heroes, The French Connection and Dirty Harry.
Obviously, everyone already knows the solid Eastwood, who resembles dad Clint so easily here you might think that "Dirty Harry" has gone to war.
It brought graphic violence to the screen—as did Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and Ken Russell’s The Devils, which were from the same year—in a way that shocked and horrified viewers.
Cinematically, it’s “Zulu” or “The Green Berets,” with a heavy dose of the Afghan War documentary “Restrepo” for realism.
That sets up what seems like an update of “Sorcerer,” William Friedkin’s underseen, ultra-suspenseful “The Wages of Fear” remake, in which a small team transports nitroglycerin via a similar vehicle.
It then briefly veers into “Sorcerer” territory as the troops are ordered to drive an unwieldy vehicle over treacherous terrain (if you have never seen William Friedkin’s underrated 1977 remake of “The Wages of Fear,” you really should check it out), before finally becoming “Assault on Precinct 13” as hundreds of Taliban forces attack the base in the early hours of October 3, 2009, in what became known as the Battle of Kamdesh.
There is an immersive verisimilitude to Rod Lurie's "The Outpost," a wrenching war thriller that has absorbed the lessons of documentaries like Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington's "Restrepo" as well as Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" and Stone's "Platoon," which it resembles less in form than in effect.
There have been other films about the Afghan war, including 12 Strong, War Machine, Lone Survivor, and the superb doc Restrepo.
Cinematically, it’s “Zulu” or “The Green Berets,” with a heavy dose of the Afghan War documentary “Restrepo” for realism.
The 2010 documentary Restrepo, though, has them all beat).
For anyone who has seen the documentary Restrepo from Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger which they shot in Afghanistan at Camp Restrepo in the Kandahar Valley, you will immediately see the authenticity and detail that Carlson brings to play with THE OUTPOST.
The overall experience of watching The Outpost isn’t akin to that of a Platoon or an Apocalypse Now .
Mr. Lurie, who seems more at home in the political world of last year's "The Contender", working from a script by David Scarpa, never creates the emotional tension necessary to propel a story like this to the height of a "Great Escape" or "Cool Hand Luke".
The Last Castle happily trots out a string of clichés familiar from movies such as Cool Hand Luke (Winter makes Irwin repeatedly carry rocks from one end of the prison yard to the other) and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (organising a rebellion against authority, some of the characters etc), yet, to his credit, Lurie makes them work and the pacing of the film carries you along nicely - it’s only later on, after you’ve left the cinema, when you find yourself wondering things such as why, in a prison full of convicts, is everyone so damned nice?
After accidentally insulting Col. Winter's prized collection of military artifacts ("Only a man who has never seen a day of battle collects stuff like this"), Gen. Irwin goes through the obligatory prison movie chestnuts: the scene where the loner sits at the new guy's table; the scene where the jailed bang their cups against the bars in a show of Dead Poets' Society solidarity; and the Cool Hand Luke scenario of digging a hole all day only to fill it in all night.
“Cool Hand Luke” and “Shawshank Redemption” did that too, only doing it much more effectively than “The Last Castle.”
There are similarities to " Cool Hand Luke " and its battle of wills.
The Dirty Dozen (1967)
Directed by Robert Aldrich
influenced The Outpost (2020), The Last Castle (2001)
Themes
So, for me, watching a serious war movie (not a cartoonish one like The Great Escape or The Dirty Dozen) is more akin to a meditative walk through a cemetery than a visit to an amusement park.
And before you can utter the phrase "The Dirty Dozen", the film parades out a host of unusual and wacked out convicts that one would guarantee came out of the Stock Characters Department.
If exceptional works like The Hurt Locker and Dunkirk have defined what is good in the genre in recent years, this harrowing look at the 2009 Battle of Kamdesh belongs right in that conversation.
Be that as it may, in comparison to some war movies like Sam Mendes's wildly successful 2019 hit 1917 or even Kathryn Bigelow's Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker (which both allowed ample space for their leads to fully explore a range of emotions about what they were enduring), The Outpost focuses more on the intense, and often crass, camaraderie these soldiers have rather than the emotional impact each of them experiences while being there.
In this way, there’s more of a feel similar to The Hurt Locker as far as independent vs. big budget is concerned.
Also good are Steve Burton, who plays Captain Peretz, the real power behind Colonel Winter, Clifton Collins Jr., who plays Corp. Ramon Aguilar, the son of a bricklayer, Delroy Lindo of "The Cider House Rules," who plays Gen. James Wheeler, Brian Goodman, an actor who really was in prison once, plays prisoner Beaupre.
So, for me, watching a serious war movie (not a cartoonish one like The Great Escape or The Dirty Dozen) is more akin to a meditative walk through a cemetery than a visit to an amusement park.
Minus the absurd ironies of “Catch-22,” the hallucinatory madness of “Apocalypse Now,” the clockwork precision of “Dunkirk” or the existential grimness of the recently rereleased 1985 Soviet film “Come and See,” there is something missing about “The Outpost.”
It then briefly veers into “Sorcerer” territory as the troops are ordered to drive an unwieldy vehicle over treacherous terrain (if you have never seen William Friedkin’s underrated 1977 remake of “The Wages of Fear,” you really should check it out), before finally becoming “Assault on Precinct 13” as hundreds of Taliban forces attack the base in the early hours of October 3, 2009, in what became known as the Battle of Kamdesh.