Movie Review: Last Men in Aleppo

Last Men in Aleppo *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Firas Fayyad.

Written by: Firas Fayyad.

 

I’m not quite sure how to take a film like Last Men in Aleppo – what to do with it really. Here is a film that was shot by the filmmakers with no regard for their own safety – yet doesn’t glamorize itself – and shows both the best and worst that humanity has to offer. Shot in 2015 and 2016, the film follows the White Helmets in the Syrian city of Aleppo – regular men who are the first on the scene of a bombing, picking through rumble to try and find people – hopefully still alive – who have been crushed do to bombings by either the Bashar as-Assad regime, or the Russian air force. We see the men as they dig through the rumble, and find people alive and dead – sometimes just their body parts. They know their city is doomed, and yet they cannot bare to leave it. It is their home, and they’re going to fight for it in this way.

 

Yet, it’s tough to know how to respond to a film like this – what to do with it – because it is essentially a document of a massacre that everyone is powerless to stop. If this were a dramatic film, people would complain that it is repetitive – which it is – and has no arc, which it doesn’t. Yes, we get to know two of the White Helmets – family man Khaled, who seems to go back and forth in regards to whether he regrets not taking his family to Turkey when he has the chance, and the quieter Mahmoud – who along with his brother, is lying to his parents about what they do for a living (they think that they’re both in Turkey, working). Basically, what the film does for its entire runtime is follow them as they head from one bombing to another – and those sad, quiet moments in between, when they know something could happen at any minute.

 

Bombings, like the ones depicted in the film, are designed to decimate a population – to essentially beat them into submission or kill them. There is no nuance to them – there becomes a numbing sameness to them, as we see the same thing again and again and again. I think that’s largely the point of the film – to show how hopeless it all seems, and yet, how the White Helmets keep going out anyways. If they can put up it for weeks, months, years on end – surely, you can sit through a movie about it, right? The film provides almost no context for the what is happening or why – a title card gives only the most basic of outlines at the beginning, and the protests we glimpse throughout don’t really say why they do not like Assad, or what they are rebelling against. You don’t really need it either – this isn’t a film about the rebellion, the war – it’s about the day-to-day reality of living in a city that is being slowly destroyed.

 

Last Men in Aleppo is, I think, precisely the film it makers wanted it to be. It is a punishing film, and a harsh one – and one that exists not to provide easy answers or uplift, but simply to document destruction. For whatever you want to make of the film, it is exactly what it is.