Movie Review: The Outpost

The Outpost (2020) *** ½ / *****
Directed by: Rod Lurie.
Written by: Eric Johnson and Paul Tamasy based on the book by Jake Tapper.
Starring: Scott Eastwood (Staff Sergeant Clint Romesha), Caleb Landry Jones (Specialist Ty Carter), Orlando Bloom (CPT Benjamin Keating), Milo Gibson (CPT Robert Yllescas), Celina Sinden (Cpt. Katie Kopp), Jack Kesy (Sgt. Josh Kirk), Taylor John Smith (First Lt Andrew Bundermann), Jacob Scipio (Staff Sgt. Justin T. Gallegos), Cory Hardrict (SGT Vernon Martin), Bobby Lockwood (Kevin Thomson), James Jagger (Chris Jones), Alexander Arnold (Griffin), Will Attenborough (Ed Faulkner), Kwame Patterson (Sylvanius Broward), Scott Alda Coffey (Michael Scusa), Trey Tucker (CPT Stoney Portis), Jonathan Yunger (SFC Jonathan Hill), Henry Hughes (Brad Larson), Alfie Stewart (Pfc. Zorias Yunger), Daniel Rodriguez (SPC Daniel Rodriguez), Jack DeVos (Sergeant Joshua Hardt), Aleksandar Aleksiev (Sgt. Janis Lakis), Jack Kalian (Shane Courville), Chris Born (Stephan Mace), George Arvidson (Captain Chris Cordova), Marin Rangelov (Nasir), Ernest Cavazos (Sgt. Armando Avalos), Jeremy Ang Jones (PFC Jordan Wong), Ahmad Sakhi (Commander Zahid), Brandon Wengrzynek (Sergeant John Breeding), Anthony Kenmore (SPC Justin Gregory), M. Scott Mortensen (SPC Thomas Rasmussen), Anton Trendafilov (Chief Haji Yunus), Sharif Dorani (Mohammed).

A lot has been written about Hollywood abandoning the “middle range” movie – the films that aren’t designed to be blockbusters, but aren’t indies either – they inhabit the middle ground somewhat, used to be wide released, but only had to make far less than a blockbuster in order to be profitable – often times topping out between $40-$70 million at the box office. Hollywood abandoned them because these films were too much for indie studios to make, but whose profit margins were too small for the behemoth studios to care. I mention this off the top, because I think it was filmmakers like Rod Lurie who have suffered the most from this abandonment – the major auteurs and masters have been able to soldier on, keep getting their films made one way or another, but Lurie – who carved out a little niche for himself making smart, political thrillers like The Contender (2000) and Nothing But the Truth (2008) – but hasn’t made a film since 2011’s remake of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs. He is a fine director – and writer for that matter – and we’re a poorer film culture for not having more films by him.

His latest film, The Outpost, is further proof of Lurie’s skills behind the camera. It’s a film like the recent Greyhound, that I really feel could have been better had we had the opportunity to see it in a theater. Unlike Greyhound though, it still works fine at home. Still, this is a claustrophobic war film, that seeks to trap us with its characters in their nearly impossible situation, as hellfire rains down around them.

The film takes place in 2006, in Afghanistan – at an Outpost in Kamdesh. It was never a smart place to put an outpost – in the middle of a valley, surrounding by ridges and cliffs, that give the enemy Taliban lots of place to hide, and shoot directly into the Outpost. It’s an indefensible position, but the men there are tasked with defending it anyway. They say their mission is to survive – and the movie makes clear just how hard that job was.

The first hour of the film is full of talk, with the occasional outburst of violence. Soldiers are killed, including their commanding officer, and the men keep having to soldier on. We get to know a few of the men –alpha male Clint Romesha (Scott Eastwood), and the decidedly not alpha male Carter (Caleb Landry Jones) chief among them. The rest, unfortunately, do tend to blend together. We do get a sense of how fraught their situation is – how hard it is defending the position, and how death and gunfire are daily occurrences. The last hour is basically an all-out assault – the Taliban is coming with everything they have – and the soldiers basically have to fight to just stay alive. Air support is coming – but it will take a while. The soldiers may well not have a while.

The film clearly takes it leads from something like Ridley Scott’s masterful Black Hawk Down (2000). People who complained that the Somalian soldiers in that film were basically a faceless horde without humanity, will likely complain about the same thing hear. To me though, that’s part of the film’s strategy – this isn’t a “both side” film – but a film about what it was like trapped in that valley, in that outpost, with sniper fire, mortar fire and everything else raining down on you – never being quite sure where it’s coming from, or how to fight back. It isn’t about the politics of the war, whether we should have been there or not, etc. It’s about these American soldiers put in an impossible situation, how they fought back and tried to survive anyway – and how many of them had to die in order for the policy to change.  It is, as the cliché goes, about fighting for the man next to you.

And it is viscerally entertaining. No, it doesn’t rank up with Black Hawk Down, or Saving Private Ryan, or films like that. But it does do what many films about America’s war in the Middle East have been unable to do to this point – and really be about the men on the ground, and make audiences – no matter what their political persuasion – question what it really means to “Support The Troops”. I would think the best way to support them is to not put them into this kind of impossible situation to begin with.