Lone Survivor is inspired by a true story about four American SEALs who were ambushed during a 2005 reconnaissance mission in Afghanistan that was part of Operation Red Wings. Evaluated strictly as an action film, Lone Survivor is put together pretty effectively. The camerawork and choreography of the long, intense fighting scenes is done well and excitingly. The dialog, while minimal, is sufficient to give a fairly decent picture of the choices the SEALs faced throughout the operation, although much of the dialog is focused on showing what tough bastards they all are. Character development is minimal, but personalities do emerge to a certain extent. The story is depressing as hell, but one of the four guys does survive (Marcus Luttrell, whose recollections form the basis of the memoir which inspired the movie), and at the end the film honors his many fallen comrades with real pictures and video footage.

But even though Lone Survivor is a very literal, idealess film, focusing solely on the recreation of a sequence of physical events, it nevertheless projects on its audience a powerful set of fallacious sociopolitical ideas, ideas that are consumed without question amidst the story’s intensely one-sided emotions. In so doing, it tarnishes the memory of the brave soldiers who died, whose deaths are thus reduced to mere propaganda for our government’s military ambitions. Here’s interesting reading on the true story of Operation Red Wings, written by Ed Darak for the Marine Corps Gazette in 2011, detailing some of the distortions and exaggerations that made their way into Luttrell’s memoir, and discussing the importance of honesty in reporting military matters to the civilian population. Unfortunately, the movie further intensifies this pattern of distortion and exaggeration.

The target of the reconnaissance mission, Ahmad Shah, is presented in the film as a high-level Al Qaeda operative and a Taliban leader. In reality he was just a local guerrilla commander, with no ties to al Qaeda, and was not even Taliban. The film also lies that Shah had “killed twenty Marines” the week before Operation Red Wings (“and if we don’t do something about him he’ll kill 20 more next week”); official government casualty figures flatly deny this. The sad fact is these brave, talented soldiers did not die fighting terrorists and keeping America safe; they died for murky geopolitical reasons related to the U.S. desire to control and exploit the Middle East, and to prop up the puppet government we installed in Afghanistan after forcing the Taliban from power. This does not diminish the tragedy of their deaths, but shouldn’t we at least be honest about why they died, so we can make an informed assessment of the actual value of their sacrifice?

Furthermore, in the military’s official AAR (after action report) on Operation Red Wings, Luttrell stated they were ambushed by 20-35 men; in the memoir and the movie the attackers suddenly number more than a hundred, with the four SEALs killing at least 20-35, yet still losing the fight overwhelmingly. It’s not like this issue is all hearsay either: Shah filmed two videos of the ambush, and U.S. military analysis of these seems to confirm a very small band of attackers, maybe as small as 8-10. Plus, Luttrell was never seconds from having his head hacked off with a machete (the film strongly pushes this idea of barbarians cutting heads off), Shah never attacked the village that sheltered and gave medical aid to Luttrell (not surprisingly, because such an act would have eroded village support for insurgent groups), and Luttrell was never anywhere near flat-lining – in fact, according to the memoir they stopped to have tea with the locals during his recovery by the U.S. military.

All this may seem like harmless embellishment, but when mixed with the film’s direct implication that what got the soldiers killed was lack of functioning equipment, shortage of attack helicopters, and what Luttrell sees as the excessively humane U.S. military rules of engagement (the film strongly implies that if the SEALs had just murdered the three innocent goat-herders that accidentally compromised the mission they would have survived), the film’s overall message is that the few but super-human soldiers of the United States are over there fighting (hopelessly outnumbered and with one arm tied behind their backs) an overwhelming and demonic terrorist army of evil monsters intent on beheading every American on earth. This nonsense really does not need reinforcement in the American consciousness, especially since all that really happened in this story is a local guerrilla leader and his small, rag-tag force attacked the foreign army currently (and illegally) occupying their country.

It’s very sad that Lone Survivor decided to tell this story through a warped lens of paranoid jingoism, rather than simply telling the truth. I guess the truth is just too complicated and painful for Americans to deal with. So see Lone Survivor if you want, but it’s probably best to consume it as a work of pure fiction.