Hell and Back Again Movie Review

It often feels like every decade has its own subject that is annually nominated in the Best Documentary Feature category at the Oscars. This decade’s focus is the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Looking through the records, I’m surprised to discover that only three have been nominated (with one winning). Although this year the Iraq War as subject made its way into the Documentary Short category so I guess that makes up some ground.

One of this year’s nominees in the feature category is Hell and Back Again about a veteran of the Afghanistan War who suffered a bullet wound that shattered hip and his femur. Now he gets around with a walker or wheelchair, goes to physical therapy and probably suffers from some form of PTSD although the film is never really explicit about any of it.

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.