Restrepo

Directed by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington

(R)

****

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The “most suspenseful, terrifying, and intense movie of the summer,” Restrepo is also an “impressive, even heroic feat of journalism,” said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. From 2007 to 2008, journalists Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington spent 15 months embedded in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, one of the deadliest regions in the country, at an Army outpost named Restrepo (after a 20-year-old medic who was killed early on in the mission). The two men used portable video cameras to capture a “blunt, sympathetic, thorough accounting” of one platoon in the Battle Company of the 173rd Brigade’s daily struggle to defeat the Taliban—and simply stay alive. Through them, we experience the realities of the Afghan war, said Wesley Morris in The Boston Globe. The picture that emerges is of “a Sisyphean battle in a country made almost entirely of hills and boulders.” What makes Restrepo tragic is that, two years later, we now know the campaign in Korengal “accomplished nothing,” said Andrew O’Hehir in Salon.com. This brave film shows us not only the “true cost of heroism” but also the “pointless cruelty of war.”