220 LONE SURVIVOR
box office hit; during its 17- week domestic run (widest release: 3,285 theaters), Lone
Survivor grossed $125 million. Foreign ticket sales totaled $29.7 million, making
for a total gross of $154.8 million. Reviews were, however, mixed, and some, like
David Edelstein’s, were highly critical. Edelstein especially faulted Peter Berg for
not widening the geopo liti cal perspective: “The film doesn’t link the absence of air
support and the near- total failure of communication in the mountains to an admin-
istration that diverted personnel and precious resources from Af ghan i stan to the
catastrophic occupation of Iraq, leaving men like Luttrell with a tragically impos-
sible job. Nor does it suggest that one reason good guys like Luttrell and his team
had such a difficult time winning ‘hearts and minds’ was that at places like
Bagram... prisoners were being tortured to death by U.S. interrogators in the ser-
vice of Dick Cheney’s ‘Dark Side’ manifesto. Instead, Berg leads you to the conclu-
sion that these Americans were just too good, too true, too respectful. Luttrell’s
operation— and his team’s lives— might have been saved if they’d summarily exe-
cuted three passing goat- herders rather than following the Rules of Engagement...
Lone Survivor is a brutally effective movie, made by people who think that they’re
serving their country. But they’re just making us coarser and more self- centered.
They’re perpetuating the kind of propaganda that sent the heroes of Seal Team 10 to
their deaths” (Edelstein, 2014).Reel History Versus Real History
According to Ed Darrack, author of Victory Point: Operations Red Wings and Whalers—
the Marine Corps’ Battle for Freedom in Af ghan i stan (2009), Patrick Robinson’s
book, Lone Survivor, contains some serious inaccuracies, omissions, and exag-
gerations. Darrack writes, “The (very gripping, yet extraordinarily unrealistic)
narrative of a small special operations team inserted on a lonely mountain to not
just surveil, but to take down the operations of one of Osama bin Laden’s top men—
who had hundreds of fighters with him— continued to propagate throughout the
media” (Darrack, 2011, p. 62). In an exhaustively researched series of articles at
their website OnViolence. com, Michael and Eric Cummings detail the film’s
numerous falsehoods. Early in the movie, Axelson (Ben Foster) claims that Ahmad
Shah killed 20 Marines in the week before Operation Red Wings, but official casu-
alty rec ords show that the United States did not lose 20 Marines during that period.
In the film, Marcus Luttrell literally dies of his wounds and is resuscitated by
medics. In his book, Luttrell recalls that he was not in mortal danger when res-
cued but “reported stable and unlikely to die” (p. 352). The movie depicts Luttrell
as having Ahmad Shah in his gunsights at one point. In the book, Luttrell and the
SEALs never see Shah, much less aim at him. In the film, Shah’s lieutenant, Taraq
(Sammy Sheik) comes to the village, grabs Luttrell, and is about to behead him
when he is driven off at the last minute by the local villa gers firing their AK-47s.
In real ity, none of this happened; a wounded Luttrell was beaten by Taliban
fighters but not threatened with beheading. In the film, Luttrell withstands
excruciating pain when he extracts a bullet from his own leg with a knife. This
never happened; in real ity the bullet went through and through. The movie ends
with the villa gers of Kandish fending off a massive Taliban attack. The prosaic