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movie review - 12 Strong

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

This is the telling of a team of US soldiers that went into the Taliban's stronghold in Afghanistan following the 9/11 terrorist strike. It's hard to tell what's fact and fiction here, and a lot of the gushing over the military (which we see in other movies since 9/11) gets in the way of treating the characters like real people. That is, they're treated with an unlikely sort of unquestioning awe. The story follows the difficult arrival in Afghanistan and then the horse-back push against the Taliban. It's plenty gritty and there are numerous battle scenes (which become hard to distinguish in memory) and it grinds on and on to an ending that in all too great fidelity to reality is hard to judge in terms of victory or failure. Knowing what we now know about that war, and how it led to twenty years of bloodshed and destruction and expenditure only to be reverted - it's hard to get too invested in what the characters are doing.

It's well made but it feels like an apologist piece that's curiously late in the fray. Not recommended.