Restrepo review

Restrepo was an outpost dug out of the side of the Korengal Valley, Afghanistan, by 15 American soldiers. It was named after a beloved medic that was shot twice in the head by the Taliban and was built in the middle of the night under 360 degree fire. Until they tactically withdrew, Second Platoon held the most advanced position of any American unit – ”a great big middle finger to the Taliban” – the tip of the spear in the war on terror.

Restrepo is an aggressive experience, as blunt and forceful as it must and should be. There’s no voice-over, no interviews with anyone beyond the soldiers, no Afghan perspective, no geopolitical explorations. It is 150 hours of deeply embedded footage edited down to a mosaic of enduring moments. “Beliefs are a way to avoid looking at reality,” directors Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger say in their statement, after spending over a year in the continuous company of their subject. “This is reality.”

The politicised, ideological posits of this war are avoided by both the soldiers and their chroniclers, but whilst the questions of rationale are never voiced, they are inferred with a hard insistence; what do these men hope to achieve in this place? Why are they here?  When asked, the soldier’s answer is immediate and resounding: “To fight for my country, Sir.”

And yet, when the soldiers meet to mourn a comrade’s death, their Captain speaks of the enemy only in the bitter terms of revenge: “We need to make them feel how we are feeling now. We need to find them and we need to make them pay.”

But jihad is an elusive, protean ghost, hidden amongst the trees and rocks, emerging and blending again at will. Despite multiple attacks, only one Taliban fighter is seen. The soldier thought he saw his death.

Restrepo does not argue for the futility of war, nor is it a vainglorious soldier-of-fortune parable. It is both and neither and more besides. This is the soldier-literature of the twenty-first century, the heir to Stephen Crane, Wilfred Owen, Ernest Hemingway and Bao Ninh, scrawled in the sparse and forceful prose of documentary cinema.

But the irony of Restrepo is that, while it is about the practitioners and practices of this war of necessity, it is not about the war. Because, in the lexicon of McChrystal, Petraeus and Obama, this is now a counter-insurgency operation.

The Afghans of the Korengal, to whom we offer statehood, live in huts made of mud and stone, clinging to the most unforgiving of mountains. You can tell in the faces of the men with whom the soldiers meet for a weekly ‘shura’ that they are barely aware of life beyond the walls of this valley. The soldiers talk of bringing money and jobs and governance. The people they attempt to protect show little awareness of these concepts. Why should they crave them?

But Junger and Hetherington’s camera is only fleetingly interested. When Restrepo looks beyond the faces of the soldiers, we see wide-shots sweeping across the Korengal; families peering out from farmhouses, children hiding behind their mother’s clothes, old men herding goats. Herein lies the purpose. This is the war, and it is only glimpsed.

Read more at restrepo.dogwoof.com