The Outpost (2020)
Directed by Rod Lurie
A small unit of U.S. soldiers, alone at the remote Combat Outpost Keating, located deep in the valley of three mountains in Afghanistan, battles to defend against an overwhelming force of Taliban fighters in a coordinated attack. The Battle of Kamdesh, as it was known, was the bloodiest American engagement of the Afghan War in 2009 and Bravo Troop 3-61 CAV became one of the most decorated units of the 19-year conflict.
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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.
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.
July 19, 2020 – This gritty war movie, directed by Rod Lurie (“The Contender”) about soldiers fighting to survive against long odds at an isolated, nearly indefensible, outpost is about bravery as well as the ultimate futility of American military efforts in Afghanistan.
Directed by Rod Lurie (The Contender) from a book written by Jake Tapper, the movie functions as well as an ensemble war movie can.
These are effective bits that recall some of Lurie’s earlier work, films like The Contender, The Last Castle, and the under-seen Resurrecting The Champ.
Working from the nonfiction book of the same name by CNN’s Jake Tapper and adapted by Oscar-nominated screenwriters Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson (The Fighter), director Rod Lurie (The Contender) has crafted The Outpost, a truly harrowing, often terrifying look at the bloodiest American engagement of the 19-year Afghan War—2009’s Battle of Kamdesh.
Lurie (“The Contender”) throws too much at the viewer too soon, only to spend another two-thirds of the running time developing the characters.
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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 .
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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.
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.