Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Restrepo

It's doubtful you'll ever see a combat documentary that channels the chaos of war as thoroughly as this one. The film's directors, Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, spent close to a year hanging out with the U.S. Army's Second Platoon in Afghanistan's treacherous Korengal Valley. But the movie they came up with is so jittery and existential and — to be blunt — slapped together that you may feel you're watching some cell-phone-video version of raw author's notes for a men's magazine article. Restrepo turns the insular, fractious horror of war into an insular, fractious movie.