Movies based on true stories are among my favorites. It takes a lot for me to actually get emotionally involved in a movie, but when the stories are true, I realize that it could happen to anyone. It could happen to someone I know. It could happen to me. Lone Survivor is one of the best based-on-a-true-story movies I've seen in a very long time.
The movie opened with a montage of a real, or seemingly real, training camp for the U.S. Navy. Trainees were pushing through training exercises and tests, getting screamed at, bonding, helping one another, struggling, succeeding, and completing the rigorous training with beaming smiles on their faces. The bond the forms between training marines is unlike any other. They are brothers. They're all each other has during training and when deployed. They need to love each other and protect each other at all costs, and that takes a type of love many of us don't experience. Opening with this montage grabbed my attention and reminded me and all of the audience members that this story is true and it happened to an average American Marine, not Mark Wahlberg or any other Hollywood actor. I think that was the best decision the creative team made when making this movie, because after that, the rest of the movie seems so real and you're emotionally involved in a different way than you would be if it opened with an A-list Hollywood actor like Mark Wahlberg, who portrays Petty Officer First Class Marcus Luttrell, the man whose experience in Afghanistan this story is based on.
About halfway through the movie, I admit I felt a hint of boredom. I began wondering if the entire movie was going to be one long gunfight. It seemed to go on for a while, though it was moving along and changing scenery. The action was not boring, but I wondered if anything would change or something new would happen. I wondered why they would base a movie on only a lengthy and somewhat interesting gunfight.
That boredom vanished almost immediately when something wildly unexpected happened between Luttrell and some Arab men who were not involved in the Taliban. Without spoiling the major turn of events of the story, what happens is beyond my imagination and it touches my heart in a way I wouldn't have expected. I understood what the story was about now, and I was even more obsessed.
At the end of the movie they brought it back to real life by showing you pictures of every soldier you met during the movie and explained their rank, their families, or their lives or their families' lives after the military. It was important for the creators of this movie to remind the audience that this was not about Hollywood and cinema, it was about America and real-life Marines. It creates an emotional attachment to the movie that would otherwise not be there, and it's what makes this movie amazing.
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