Reviews for this film from our members:
- [New – 3/6/14] | Marco Albanese @ Stanze di Cinema [Italian]
- Excerpt: Il film di Peter Berg, passato dietro la macchina da presa dopo un’onorevole carriera d’attore, è il classico film militaresco e patriottico sulla campagna in Afghanistan.
- José Arce @ LaButaca.net
- Excerpt: Drama bélico tremendamente espectacular en su puesta en escena pero incapaz de echar el freno cuando hace falta. Peter Berg opta por la exaltación del sacrificio hooyah en lugar de repudiar los horrores de la guerra. Lástima, aunque es digna de verse por su planificación técnica.
- Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat @ SpiritualityandPractice.com
- Excerpt: Story of super-soldiers in Afghanistan, a failed mission, and two surprising act of mercy in the midst of all the bloodshed.
- Kevin Carr @ 7M Pictures
- Excerpt: Berg doesn’t seem to have made the film as a piece of propaganda or to get people to chant “U! S! A!” at the screenings. He made the film to celebrate American heroes who put their lives on the line, and suffer the consequences.
- Bill Clark @ From The Balcony
- Laura Clifford @ Reeling Reviews
- Excerpt: The logistics of the situation holds enough drama, but the filmmaker indulges in…the violence done to these men. It’s “The Passion of the Christ” missing the self-sacrificial will.
- Phil Concannon @ Phil on Film
- Edwin Davies @ A Mighty Fine Blog
- Excerpt: At its best, Lone Survivor recalls the sort of lean, muscular action films that Walter Hill made in his heyday. It’s especially reminiscent of Southern Comfort, Hill’s relentlessly tense thriller about National Guardsmen who wrong a group of Cajuns and find themselves running through unfamiliar, hostile territory.
- Tony Dayoub @ Cinema Viewfinder
- Excerpt: …only the most jingoistic would celebrate this punishing endurance test, as anything more than a kind of cruel PASSION OF PRIVATE RYAN.
- Jim Dixon @ Examiner.com
- Excerpt: “Lone Survivor,” a seriously intended and well-crafted movie about modern warfare and warriors might well be Peter Berg’s atonement for “Battleship.” The bloody combat sequences are where this movie lives and breathes, and in fact those invite comparison to “Saving Private Ryan” and “Black Hawk Down.”
- Candice Frederick @ Reel Talk
- Dustin Freeley @ MoviesAboutGladiators.com
- Excerpt: Lone Survivor is a jingoistis chronicle of horrors.
- Susan Granger @ www.susangranger.com
- Excerpt: Low-key realistic, yet brutal and sobering – the sad title, itself, is a spoiler.
- Nick Hartel @ DVD Talk
- Excerpt: While “Lone Survivor” focuses specifically on the events leading up to and the ultimate execution of Operation Red Wings, what it doesn’t focus on is telling a story without resorting to tired jingoistic film tactics, instead offering viewers a tedious two-hour action film designed to manipulate the emotions of the audience based solely on the basis of it’s based in reality origins.
- Roderick Heath @ This Island Rod
- Excerpt: The true story of Operation Red Wings is well worth telling, a sad, thrilling, absurd exposition of everything that can go wrong in modern war, but for Berg it’s something like The Hunger Games with buff dudes in army fatigues.
- Mark Hobin @ Fast Film Reviews
- Excerpt: Lone Survivor is a weird mix of jingoism and “war is hell” mentality. The opening crawl of actual training footage feels like a military recruitment film, but then the senseless escalating body count screams otherwise.
- Travis Hopson @ Punch Drunk Critics
- Excerpt: Despite Berg’s painting in broad strokes and reveling in the violence too much, Lone Survivor is itself a glowing tribute to the drive, determination, and spirit of our armed forces.
- MaryAnn Johanson @ FlickFilosopher.com
- Excerpt: Acknowledges the powerful fraternity of soldiers without being jingoistic, and depicts the intensity and adrenaline of a battlefield without being pornographic.
- Dan Kelly @ eFilmCritic
- Excerpt: Where Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty” painted the moral complexities of the situation with deft brush strokes, “Lone Survivor” just plasters Crayon over the nursery walls
- Ben Kendrick @ Screen Rant
- Excerpt: A moving (and draining) look at the tragic events of Operation Red Wings.
- Jennie Kermode @ Eye For Film
- Jeremy Kibler @ The Artful Critic
- Excerpt: The film is more interested in the real-time action of that fateful day than character development, and yet, through all the sound, fury, and blood, there are visceral and dramatically quiet moments that don’t stand the viewer emotionally at arm’s length
- Kristin Dreyer Kramer @ NightsAndWeekends.com
- Don Lewis @ Film Threat
- Glenn Lovell @ CinemaDope.com
- Excerpt: The battle scenes are as grueling, as in-your-face excruciating as the running gunfights in ‘The Wild Bunch.’ Indeed, in places ‘Lone Survivor’ feels more like a revisionist western than a standard-issue war movie.
- Mike McGranaghan @ The Aisle Seat
- Matthew McKernan @ FilmWhinge
- Excerpt: Its representation of war as action undercuts its seriousness as a film about humans suffering under extreme situations and its emphasis on ‘the brotherhood’ ends up having only an ideological intent. As it is, then, it is another American film that rewrites history and tries to sanctify dirty foreign policies.
- Brent McKnight @ The Last Thing I See
- Pat Mullen @ Cinemablographer
- Jonathan Richards @ www.jonrichardsplace.com
- Excerpt: For war to make any sense at all there has to be an unequivocal sense of good and bad. Here, it’s only ours and theirs.
- Jerry Roberts @ Armchair Cinema
- Excerpt: Berg takes a tragic true story and doesn’t disgrace it with a lot of phony camera tricks or needless subplots. He knows the story he wants to tell and he tells it very well.
- Tom Santilli @ Examiner.com
- Excerpt: The results are humbling, eye-opening and horrifying.
- Amir Siregar @ Flick Magazine [Indonesian]
- Cole Smithey @ ColeSmithey.com
- Excerpt: All films are political. All film is propaganda.
- Josh Spiegel @ Sound on Sight
- Frank Swietek @ One Guys Opinion
- Excerpt: Captures the intensity of the 2005 mission [but] fails to go beyond first-rate reenactment…to a deeper assessment of how and why it happened in the broader context of the war.
