The Outpost

In 1994, Alexander Sokurov released a documentary about soldiers deployed to the border of Afghanistan and Tajikisstan.  The movie is about 6 1/2 hours long and called Spiritual Voices:  From the Diary of a Commander.  I saw the film years ago, watching it in 90 minute increments over four or five evenings.  The picture shows Russian soldiers living in pits and trenches lined with zinc atop a mountain.  They drink a lot and seem to be terribly bored.  From time to time, they descend a thousand feet into a rugged, treeless ravine through which a torrent of water flows.  This is where they wash their clothing.  Some times, an invisible enemy takes potshots at them and they return fire.  There are a couple of skirmishes that are filmed from about six inches off the ground in which we see troops crawling on their bellies and firing their guns.  Someone mentions that NATO might send soldiers into these remote barren mountains to keep the peace.  The Russians scornfully say that the NATO troops would commit suicide if they had to live for any extended time under these conditions.  This movie was made when Russia was fighting the Mujaheddin, among them Osama Bin Laden -- insurgents then allied with the United States.  Rod Lurie's The Outpost takes place in October 2009 in the same general terrain.  In this film, the local tribal warriors are now fighting the United States.  But the situation is pretty much the same -- an isolated outpost is under fire daily from invisible adversaries.  Living conditions are spartan, although considerably better than the primitive pits and lean-tos occupied by the Russians.  The main difference is that the American outpost is at the base of the mountains, encircled by stony dizzying heights.  The unseen foe lobs mortar shells down on the outpost.  The Americans respond with their own mortar fire.  The soldiers in the ANA (Afghan National Army) are pretty much useless and, in fact, flee at the first sign of serious trouble.  As in Sokurov's movie, the soldiers speak in an impenetrable jargon of acronyms, obscenities, and military slang.  Everyone is constantly abusing everyone else.  The commander (or commanders because there are several) try to keep peace with the local elders and meet with them periodically in a shack called the Shura hut.  But the elders seems shifty, dangerous and unreliable.  They peddle corpses of women that they have probably killed themselves to earn $3500 payments of blood money.  The Afghan interpreter is convinced that a big attack is coming, but the Americans ignore him. (This motif is also prominent in the other film that the picture channels -- Zulu_  Then, the big Taliban attack, in fact, occurs and the desperate defense of the base occupies the last half of the film.  

There's no doubt that someone associated with the film has seen Sokurov's monumental documentary.  For the first half of the movie, the picture is closely attuned to the daily activities at the isolated base and focuses on the profane interplay between the troops.  (As in many war films, it's hard to keep track of the protagonists -- the film helpfully labels the soldiers when we first see them, but, unless you're keeping notes, the men all look alike and become, more or less, fungible as the movie progresses.)  The commanders at the base are unlucky.  The first, Captain Keating, tries to drive a heavy vehicle over a mountain pass but crashes the truck and ends up dead.  (The outpost is then named after him.)  The second commander is more aggressive and leads the soldier on patrols up into the rugged mountains.  We get a good vantage on the base from one of these reconnoitering missions and, therefore, understand that the fort is fundamentally indefensible, sitting at the bottom of huge stone funnel.  The second commander gets blown to pieces crossing a hanging bridge --  his brains end up in the mouth of the soldier behind him who suffers shell-shock and has to be evacuated.  A third commander named Broward is appointed to lead the mission.  Broward is thought to be cowardly by some of the men -- he's too chicken to even hike out to the privy to urinate.  Shortly after he's relieved of his command, the Taliban mount an attack in force on the outpost and this battle occupies the rest of the film.

The greatest of all movies featuring an outnumbered force beleagured from all sides by huge numbers of enemies in Cyril Enfield's Zulu, a particularly brutal, if effective, recounting of the fight at Rourke's Drift in what is now South Africa.  Once the Taliban begin the assault, the movie shifts into the mode of Zulu -- indeed, the earlier sequences invoke the movie in which Taliban attacks are, in  fact, contrived to alert the adversary as to the location of the post's defenses, the number of its defenders and the nature of their weapons (as well as the location of the ammunition depot).  (In Zulu, the tribesmen stand on an exposed hilltop stoically absorbing fire from the defending troops for the purpose of "counting their rifles.")   As in Zulu, the attackers swarm down from hillsides and, almost immediately, breach the base's perimeter.  Most of the combat occurs "within the wire" and involves desperate close-range slaughter.  As in Zulu, there are a number of tense scenes set in the field hospital.  A group of soldiers are cut off from the others, trapped in armored vehicles.  One of them, Mace is terribly wounded.  A number of scenes show efforts to drag Mace from the battlefield, an endeavor that results in more catastrophes.  Mace is brought to the field hospital where impromptu transfusions are used to revive him.  (However, he later dies.) By this time, jets from Qatar have arrived along with armed helicopters and the Taliban are blown to bits or roasted alive.  A patrol after the battle inspects craters surrounded by charred and fragmentary corpses.  The movie has a long dying fall.  As in Zulu, titles tells us that many  of the surviving soldiers received medals for valor.  However, we also see the most heroic of the soldiers on the verge of hysteria with a female psychologist treating him for post-traumatic stress.  As he breaks down in tears, a title informs us that the man is a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor -- a poignant touch that I admired.  Not content with these post-action sequences, the film then shows us Jake Tapper (the CNN newscaster) interviewing the actual soldiers who fought in the battle, including one who appears in the film.  (Tapper wrote a best-selling book about the siege.)  The picture ends with a Mormon soldier saying that scripture tells us that the gates of heaven and hell are adjacent to one another and this was what the battle now means to him -- the suffering of the troops was hellish but their bravery and sacrifice also made the experience a foretaste of heaven.  

The film seems to have been made for Netflix.  It is mostly shot with handheld cameras using distorting lenses -- the impression is that the soldiers are staggering around as imaged by selfie-stick-mounted cameras.  The effect is that the soldiers distort space around them.  The movie is primarily concerned with the actions of individual soldiers and so the slaughter of the Taliban is not really shown in any detail -- we just see the hillsides erupting in flame behind the soldiers who are running toward or away from the camera.  There is an extraordinary moment early in the movement, when the camera tilts up vertiginously to show that the base is at the foot of huge mountains, peaks so high that their tops are never really shown.  This gives us the impression that the terrain is monstrously opposed to any successful defense of the outpost.  The Outpost is singularly realistic -- half of the dialogue can't be understood because it is replete with untranslated military idioms.  The first part of the movie is like a horror film with sudden shocking bursts of violence and ominous, shuddering music on the soundtrack.  I think the picture is quite good for a movie of this type.  Like many war films, however, it is, by and large, pointless -- war is hell; soldiers suffer terribly in battle; some people can be very brave.  There's really nothing more to the movie and it's a bit hard to become too involved with the protagonists because they all look and act alike.