Film Review: Restrepo (2010)

The two-decade war in Afghanistan, concluded in 2021 with a chaotic withdrawal, is now widely regarded as one of the more significant strategic and moral fiascos in modern American, and indeed Western, history. Yet, for much of its duration—at least until its midpoint—the conflict retained a degree of public legitimacy in the West as the “Good War.” This perception was rooted in its origins as a seemingly justifiable response to the 9/11 atrocities, the absence of oil interests which lent a veneer of credibility to missions of promoting democracy and women's rights, and its comparative presentation as a less catastrophic endeavour than the concurrent disaster in Iraq. However, these abstract justifications meant precious little to the soldiers tasked with the actual fighting, a brutal reality captured with visceral intensity in the 2010 documentary Restrepo. The film, by focusing relentlessly on the ground-level experience of one platoon in one of Afghanistan's deadliest valleys, serves as an unvarnished, apolitical testament to the war's human cost, implicitly questioning the very enterprise it documents.

The film was the collaborative work of American journalist Sebastian Junger and British photojournalist Tim Hetherington. In 2007, embedded with the US Army for Vanity Fair, they spent fifteen months with the Second Platoon, Battle Company, of the 173rd Airborne Brigade in the remote and perilous Korengal Valley of Kunar Province. This material was later distilled into Junger’s book War and the documentary feature, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2010. The film takes its title from Private First Class Juan Sebastián “Doc” Restrepo, the platoon’s medic, who was among the first casualties after their deployment. In a gesture of defiant memorialisation, the platoon’s commander, Captain Dan Kearney, ordered the construction of a rudimentary fortified outpost deep in enemy territory, which the soldiers named “Restrepo.” The documentary charts the unit’s arduous existence from deployment to homecoming, with Outpost Restrepo forming the central, precarious locus of their daily struggle for survival amidst constant threat.

Restrepo consciously and rigorously avoids any overt political commentary or narrative hand-holding. The directors stated their aim was simply “to capture the reality of the soldiers,” and the film adheres to a raw, vérité style devoid of narration, score, or contextualising interviews with experts. It adopts the perspective of the young, professional soldiers themselves, for whom the grand geopolitical justifications for the war are irrelevant abstractions. Their world is circumscribed by the immediate mission, the crushing boredom punctuated by sudden terror, and the primal imperative to keep themselves and their comrades alive. The film powerfully demonstrates that superior training and technology offer no guarantee of safety; the price is paid in blood and trauma. Some of the documentary's most arresting moments are those of raw, unfiltered emotion, such as when soldiers receive news of a comrade's death in the midst of a firefight, their grief laid bare before the camera.

Structurally, the film is assembled from a series of vignettes—firefights, daily chores, moments of dark humour—rather than a propulsive narrative. Context and reflection are provided sparingly through interviews conducted with the surviving soldiers three months after their return to Italy. These segments, where men grapple with the psychological aftermath of their tour, grant the chaotic frontline footage a haunting postscript, framing the experience as an emotional burden they will carry indefinitely. This choice reinforces the film’s focus on lasting personal cost over transient tactical gain.

The documentary also largely sidesteps explicit depictions of gore, but it does not shy away from acknowledging the war’s collateral damage, noting the significant civilian casualties resulting from US actions. Crucially, it offers almost no meaningful interaction between the soldiers and the local Afghan population. A stark exception is a scene where a US officer meets with village elders, delivering rehearsed platitudes about American assistance. The elders’ expressions of profound disinterest and resignation speak volumes. This brief encounter becomes a potent microcosm of the failed “hearts and minds” campaign, suggesting the Americans were viewed merely as the latest in a long line of temporary occupiers in a scarred land. The film’s concluding title card, which notes the US military’s abandonment of the Korengal Valley and Outpost Restrepo in 2010, serves as a devastating, if understated, coda. It implies that the immense sacrifice depicted—the lives lost, the trauma endured—may have been for naught, a futile exercise in a valley soon relinquished.

Upon release, Restrepo was met with significant critical acclaim. It won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at Sundance, was named one of the year's best documentaries by the National Board of Review, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.^1^ Tragically, co-director Tim Hetherington was killed in 2011 while covering the conflict in Libya.^2^ Junger later revisited the footage for a 2014 sequel, Korengal, which adopted a more reflective tone on the soldiers' internal experiences.

A critical assessment, however, must acknowledge the film’s self-imposed limitations. Its unwavering focus on the American soldier’s experience is both its greatest strength and a potential weakness. By choosing to embed so deeply with one platoon, Hetherington and Junger achieved an unparalleled intimacy, but they consequently excluded the Afghan perspective almost entirely. This creates a portrait that is profoundly empathetic yet inherently incomplete. Critics have rightly questioned whether such a narrow frame can provide a balanced portrait of the war. The film excels at making the viewer feel the confusion, exhaustion, and dread of combat, but it deliberately stops short of weaving those feelings into a broader political or historical analysis. It shows what happened in the Korengal Valley with stunning immediacy but pointedly refuses to answer why it was happening or to what end.

Ultimately, Restrepo is a crucial, if deliberately myopic, document of modern warfare. It captures the visceral reality of counter-insurgency combat for a generation of soldiers, rendering their courage, fear, and camaraderie with unflinching honesty. Viewed from the present day, with full knowledge of the war’s ignominious conclusion, the documentary acquires a further layer of tragic pathos. The outpost named for a fallen medic, the battles fought for worthless ridges, the entire desperate enterprise in the “Valley of Death”—the film preserves these struggles not as chapters in a victorious campaign, but as visceral fragments of a long, costly, and ultimately futile occupation. It is a powerful reminder that history’s grand, often ill-conceived schemes are ultimately endured and paid for by individuals like PFC Restrepo and his comrades, whose stories of survival and loss transcend the political failures that sent them there.

RATING: 6/10 (++)

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