Checked out the latest post 9/11 war on terror / Afghanistan flick 12 Strong over the weekend. This is the apparently true accounting of the soldiers sent into Afghanistan to help the Northern Alliance fight the Taliban shortly after 9/11 (9/18, as I recall). The extra in the flick is that the American soldiers rode into battle on horseback (and, you know, called in air strikes too).
This is a pretty good war film. I’m not 100% convinced of its reality vs. maybe a little propaganda but it’s still reasonably exciting. It also manages to be blunt about America’s chances in Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires. “Leave, and you are cowards. Stay, and you are our enemy” a Afghani ally tells our soldiers bluntly at the end of the film. So if there’s any propaganda, it’s more on the side of making exciting, heroic action scenes than it is promoting foreign policy.
The film has a good cast with Chris Hemsworth, Michael Shannon, and Michael Pena leading the cast of soldiers. They did their jobs as actors given a pretty basic script which didn’t promote characters so much as events. It’s a limitation of the script we don’t get to know even the three named actors very well, much less the other nine.
Overall, a good war flick… a little long and a little repetitive at times. It honors the soldiers and speaks bluntly about the war in general (without specifically taking sides).
Score: 81