Lone Survivor, starring Mark Wahlberg, tells the real life story of Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, who found himself and his comrades ambushed by enemy combatants in Afghanistan in 2005.

Directed by Peter Berg, the film brings to the screen Lutrell’s 2007 memoir, The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of Seal Team 10. Lutrell, communications specialist Danny Dietz (Emile Hirsch), Matt Axelson (Ben Foster) and Mike Murphy (Taylor Kitsch) are among the members of Seal Team 10 who are called upon to neutralize a high-level Taliban operative, unknowingly walking into a mission that would leave all but one of then dead.

Overall, critics have offered positive reviews of this latest film to chronicle the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Praise has been especially overwhelming for Berg's filmmaking and Wahlberg’s performance. A hang up of some who viewed Lone Survivor was that the title and the truth it foretold cast an impossibly dreary shadow over the two-hour picture.

Critics Review 'Lone Survivor'

“Berg does a good job posing his — and Luttrell's — most painful kind of "What if?" without belaboring it. They release the goat herders, and things go to hell fast. The performances are muscular in a film where action begins to take over not because of miscues by the director, but precisely because that's what can happen in warfare.… Directed with care for its protagonists this film still plunges the audience into the violent predicament of its protagonists, and keeps us there. There are intentionally long scenes in which the action unfolds with chaotic fury. This is not "war-porn" pretty. The onslaught can be disorienting, desperate. As it should be.” – Lisa Kennedy, Denver Post

“Three things make "Lone Survivor" different from most old war movies, and not for the best. The first is that title. The second is the war itself. Although the Afghanistan war is one that the vast majority of Americans endorsed, it doesn't have the feeling of a great national struggle for survival, like World War II. The third is that the movie is not about citizen soldiers – average guys drafted to do a dirty job that just has to be done. It's about Navy SEALs, which sets up a whole other kind of expectation.” – Mike LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

Berg (Friday Night Lights, The Kingdom) proves a virtuoso at showing how action defines character. And Wahlberg, Kitsch, Hirsch and Foster add to the impact.… All praise to Wahlberg for a performance of shattering ferocity and feeling, especially so when Luttrell, at his most vulnerable, is offered protection by an enemy father and son. Berg rightly lets the people trump the politics. Like the best war movies, Lone Survivor laces action with moral questions that haunt and provoke.” – Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

“At its best, though, "Lone Survivor" accomplishes its mission, which is to respect these men, dramatize what they went through and let the more troubling matters of moral consequence trickle in where, and how, they may. (In one tense sequence the men debate the fate of goat herders they encounter.) Wahlberg remains one of our most reliable and least actorly of movie stars, innately macho but vulnerable enough to seem like a human being caught in an inhuman situation. Berg's film pays attention to every setback, every moment lost or won on that mountain.” – Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

Lone Survivor, rated R, is currently in wide release.

– Chelsea Regan

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