Restrepo Movie Review: 15 Months in the Life of a U.S. Army Platoon in Afghanistan

Captain Kearney sits front and center with some of the men in his unit.

O.P. Restrepo in the Korengal Valley

In recent years, the nature of documentary film making has taken on a new face, changing from standard films consisting of stock footage or video records with often stodgy narration and interviews to the modern style ushered in by documentarians like Errol Morris and Michael Moore, who often blur the line between documentary and narrative. As documentaries have relied more on narrative elements to tell a story, they have gained popularity and occasionally some box office success.

However, Restrepo is a return to old-fashioned straight-forward documentary technique. The film makers, Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger, spent 15 months on the front lines of Afghanistan, embedded with an army platoon and documenting with their cameras everything that they witnessed, which was everything from juvenile antics in the outpost to deadly firefights in the mountains. Then they conducted interviews with several surviving members of the platoon after they’d returned home and then cut it all together into a cohesive portrait of life in the Korengal Valley, at the time dubbed the most dangerous place on earth.

The two journalists remain virtually anonymous throughout the film. We rarely hear their voices and never see their faces. The stars (if we can call them that) are the (mostly) very young men of the platoon. Their courage and approach to the job is belied by their youthful faces and behavior. One young soldier, Specialist Misha Pemble-Belkin, talks about his childhood in Oregon growing up with hippie parents who wouldn’t even allow him toy guns. Shortly after that confession we see him manning a large caliber machine gun, looking like a little boy not only because of the apparent glee of having the opportunity to act out childhood fantasies he was never permitted, but because the size of the weapon itself dwarfs the man operating it.

The title Restrepo is taken from the name of the mountaintop outpost (O.P. Restrepo) built overnight to secure tactical positioning over the whole valley. The outpost itself was named for their fallen comrade Juan “Doc” Restrepo, the first casualty of their platoon shortly after deployment. His death, like the ever-present outpost, casts a pall over the men for the duration of their tour.

We see a lot of Captain Kearney, mostly in the interview segments, but also as the stoic commander of his unit. He is tasked with making the Korengal safe for building and infrastructure. I think there may be a tendency among people in the safe confines of their home countries to think that we just need to send in some contractors to build roads, run electric lines and lay some railroad track. But as we watch Kearney talk to the village elders we begin to see the Sisyphean task before us. He’s talking to elderly villagers and poor farmers about helping the U.S. military root out the insurgents so that “ten years from now the Korengal Valley’s gonna have a road going through it that’s paved so we can make more money, make you guys richer. Make you guys more powerful.”

Kearney’s rhetoric has the ring of propaganda and certainly it’s a big bill of sale, but we get the sense that he buys it himself. And certainly there is some truth to what he says, however simplified the U.S. Army tries to make it sound. But we can’t help thinking about how bizarre it must sound to the Afghan people.

Hetherinton and Junger have presented as unbiased a film as I think it was possible to put together. Of course their choices in the editing room inevitably tell one story at the expense of countless alternatives. But there’s no derision directed at the mission, nor is there any jingoism buying into it wholeheartedly. We see the results of the accidental killings of civilians as well as the deaths of American soldiers. Neither is presented as more tragic than the other. They are simply the terrible byproduct of warfare. The one moment I felt a slight sense of bias was at the inclusion of a scene in which Kearney explains to the elders that the reason the Army took one of their neighbors was because they were told he was “bad.” It’s almost impossible not to think about the U.S. track record on torture since the war began and the way those reports and stories severely undermine the credibility of our soldiers on the ground who have to rely on the trust and goodwill of the people for their own safety sometimes.

The camera functions as a passive observer to the point that the soldiers hardly seem to notice its presence. It can often feel frustrating because we’re so attuned to the conventions of battle sequences in fictional films that lay out the groundwork and show us where the enemy is and depict all the action, whereas the footage here remains constantly with the American soldiers. There’s never a cutaway to what the Americans are shooting at as convention has trained us to expect. That I felt this frustration is a testament probably more to the realism of narrative war films because the firefights in Restrepo feel like a Hollywood movie.

That frustration is no fault of the film makers of course, but the apparent lack of focus is. This may have been the intention as a sort of parallel to the unclear mission of the coalition forces in Afghanistan, but it might have been helpful to include some graphics laying out the region and explaining between missions where the soldiers are going and what their mission is. The officers always seem to know what they’re talking about but I felt a bit lost by all the chatter of directions and targets because there were few reference points given for their location at any given time away from O.P. Restrepo.

Ultimately this documentary is probably unlike anything most people have seen before. The two journalists put themselves at great risk making the film and the soldiers likely put themselves at risk protecting Hetherington and Junger. As a simple document of 15 months in the life of an Army platoon it functions, but I can’t help feeling there’s more story in there. When they inform us at the end that the U.S. withdrew from the Korengal Valley in April 2010 we immediately think about all the work that went into building O.P. Restrepo, about the lives lost defending it and what a waste it seems. But no further information is provided as to the reasons for withdrawing. Was it because the mission succeeded and the valley was secured for builders? Or was it ultimately a defeat? Restrepo maybe could have achieved greatness with a slightly clearer objective.