Which Way Is the Front Line from Here...Movie Review

Director and subject, Sebastian Junger (left) and Tim Hetherington (right) while making Restrepo.

It’s funny that I was just yesterday writing about the documentary The Crash Reel, which is about an individual drawn to extremely dangerous activities even after that activity nearly kills him, because now I find myself thinking about similar themes in relation to the subject of Sebastian Junger’s Which Way Is the Front Line from Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington. It may or may not be coincidence that both films were made by HBO. Hetherington was a photojournalist who specialized in going into war zones. He was Junger’s co-director on the Oscar-nominated documentary Restrepo. Front Line was made after Tim’s death while covering the rebel uprising in Libya in 2011.

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.