Battle Company: Loving Life, Making War (Documentary)

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“Restrepo,” a documentary that sticks close to a company of American soldiers during a grueling 14-month tour of duty in an especially dangerous part of Afghanistan, is an impressive, even heroic feat of journalism. Not that the filmmakers — Sebastian Junger, an adventurous reporter perhaps best known as the author of “The Perfect Storm,” and Tim Hetherington, a photographer with extensive experience in war zones — call attention to their own bravery. They stay behind the portable high- and standard-definition video cameras, nimble flies on a wall that is exposed to a steady barrage of bullets.

Hanging out with the members of Battle Company in their hilltop outposts in the Korangal Valley between May 2007 and July 2008, Mr. Junger and Mr. Hetherington recorded firefights, reconnaissance missions, sessions of rowdy horseplay and hours of grinding boredom. Afterward, when the tour was done, the filmmakers conducted interviews in which the soldiers tried to make sense of what they had done and seen. There is nothing especially fancy or innovative here, just a blunt, sympathetic, thorough accounting of the daily struggle to stay alive and accomplish something constructive.

Any viewer superficially acquainted with the literature and cinema of modern war will have a sense of the peril and tedium that define a soldier’s daily experience, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have spawned a number of serious and well-made films, both fictional and not. What distinguishes “Restrepo” — which belongs with “The Hurt Locker” and “Gunner Palace” on the short shelf of essential 21st-century combat movies — is not only its uniquely intensive focus on a small group of men in a particular time and place, but also its relentless attention to the lethal difficulty of their work.

The setting is the Korangal Valley, a mountainous, sparsely populated area in Eastern Afghanistan that, at least at the time, was seen as a region of prime strategic importance. (American forces withdrew from the valley this April.) It was also an exceedingly hazardous place for American soldiers, with almost every day bringing a fresh engagement, to use the military term of art that basically means being shot at by the enemy and shooting back.

http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/06/25/movies/25restrepo.html?th&emc=th