Mark Wahlberg calls 'Lone Survivor' a 'magical experience'
Toronto Sun
BY BRUCE KIRKLAND
QMI AGENCY
JANUARY 03, 2014
NEW YORK — Historical fact or hyper-fiction? The filmmakers involved with Lone Survivor, including co-producer and co-star Mark Wahlberg, struggled mightily with that issue. But they had one goal: To tell this savage story as truthfully as possible.
“Obviously,” Wahlberg says in an interview, “the goal was to make it as realistic as possible and certainly in the spirit of something.” That something is the true saga of Operation Red Wings, a failed special operations mission conducted by the U.S. Navy SEALs in June of 2005 in the rugged Hindu Kush Mountains of Afghanistan’s Kunar province.
The mission goal was to capture or kill a senior Taliban terrorist. The mission went terribly wrong, leading to 19 American deaths during a firefight.
Operation Red Wings serves as a searing insight into how some modern wars are fought, on the ground with ferocious hand-to-hand combat and high casualty rates.
The ‘lone survivor’ of the Red Wings mission is now-retired SEAL team member Marcus Luttrell, who co-wrote the biographical book that inspired writer-director Peter Berg’s film. Part of Luttrell’s ordeal took place in an Afghan Pashtun village where residents argued over the Texan’s fate.
Wahlberg plays Luttrell, and Luttrell served as one of the film’s SEAL team consultants. Wahlberg says the goal in Lone Survivor was “capturing the essence of it as close to the real thing as possible.”
Lone Survivor is a rarity. Most current American war movies are set in Iraq. An Afghan setting is unusual. The politics are complicated. The war is messy and grim and complicated and unrewarding.
But this story should still be told, Wahlberg says. “Because it’s so important. I think people take for granted what these people do for us. And it’s such an amazing story, not just in paying tribute to Marcus but also paying tribute to the Afghan villagers who risked their lives to save, basically, a stranger.”
Lone Survivor, Wahlberg adds, tries “to put a face on the Afghan people as opposed to the assumption that because we’re at war in Afghanistan that we are at war with Afghanistan. We’re not.”
Researching the Lone Survivor story, and getting to befriend Luttrell also increased Wahlberg’s respect for American soldiers, he says. “Absolutely! At the highest level. This was never about politics. It was never really about war.” Instead, he says, the film is “a tribute to the soldiers and what they sacrifice for us.”
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