REVIEW: Low-Key, High-Octane Restrepo Captures War's Everyday Realities

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But these men also have to fight, and the filmmakers' matter-of-fact approach to the combat sequences makes them all the more unnerving. The soldiers talk about one mission in particular, Operation Rock Avalanche, that took them into especially treacherous territory. On that mission, they lost another one of their men, and the filmmakers' cameras capture the immediacy, and the rawness, of their response.

I wasn't sure how I felt about this footage as I watched it; I wondered if it wasn't too much of an intrusion on the men's privacy. But the more I've thought about it, the more I think it's integral to the picture. Junger, a war correspondent for publications including Vanity Fair and National Geographic (as well as the author of The Perfect Storm), has been covering Afghanistan since 1996. Hetherington is a photographer and filmmaker (and also a Vanity Fair contributor) who has been covering war zones for 10 years. The choices they've made in Restrepo have, I think, been made carefully, and the way they capture the soldiers' immediate response to their buddy's death is key.

People who have never seen combat have very few ways of knowing what the experience of dealing with it is like. Many of us have parents or grandparents who fought in World War II, Korea or Vietnam, and most of us can probably count on one hand the number of times we heard those men talk about it. This new generation of soldiers is different. As the media has been reminding us, ad nauseam, they've been raised on video games. But a far more significant difference is that, unlike men of earlier generations, many of them have been raised in environments where they've been encouraged to talk about their feelings.

Will that make a difference in how they process, and recover from, their experience? Will any of that talking significantly alleviate their suffering? The studio footage in Restrepo, taped in Italy after the soldiers returned from their tour of duty, suggests that it might not. Maybe that's a dispiriting conclusion, but it's also a humane one. The point isn't simply that these men are risking their lives; it's that they're giving over part of their future as well. The unspoken idea behind Restrepo is that we can't just measure the effects of a war in terms of lives lost. The lives remaining count, too.

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