Marcus Luttrell, the former Navy SEAL whose deadly mission in Afghanistan has been turned into the film “Lone Survivor,” strides into a hotel room for an interview, trailed by his service dog, Mr. Rigby.
The tall, hulking, goateed Navy Cross recipient greets a journalist with a rock-hard grip, and nods to director Peter Berg and star Mark Wahlberg, who plays him in the film. This is clearly not what he wants to be doing.
Based on Luttrell’s best-selling 2007 memoir, “Lone Survivor” is about a 2005 four-man operation in northeastern Afghanistan’s Kunar province that fell apart when a trio of goat herders stumbled upon the staked-out SEALs.
“Lone Survivor,” is the latest in a series of films that pays tribute to the Navy’s special forces: In messy, uncertain wars, they’re elite practitioners of precision. In the era of the superhero film, the Navy SEALs have inspired filmmakers as the genuine article.
Luttrell would rather not talk about any of it. He went along with “Lone Survivor” and wrote the book at the urging of his superiors. Compared to the actual events, the movie is no traumatic experience for Luttrell.
“I went through it in real life, so a movie about it isn’t going to affect me in any way,” says the 38-year-old Texan.
Hollywood and the American military are worlds apart. But “Lone Survivor” is a uniquely close collaboration, one in which Berg and Wahlberg (both producers) worked under significant pressure from the families of those who died and active-duty SEALs to faithfully render the soldiers’ lives, in battle and in brotherhood.
Over the years, SEALs have been played by the likes of Bruce Willis, Steven Seagal and Demi Moore, and been a mainstay in video games. But the movies, often in close consultation with the military, have come a long way since 1990’s “Navy SEALs,” with Charlie Sheen.
2012’s “Act of Valor” was acted out by active-duty SEALs and used live-ammo sequences to portray a fictional covert mission. Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty” dramatized the most famous SEAL mission, the raid in Abbottabad that killed Osama bin Laden.
Such productions, though, have given rise to questions of accuracy and charges of propaganda.
U.S. senators claimed that too much information was shared with the filmmakers of “Zero Dark Thirty,” and many criticized the film for suggesting torture aided the hunt for bin Laden.
But the military sees in the movies a chance to shape its image and insure some degree of authenticity in depictions of its service men and women. “Lone Survivor” has largely drawn praise as a brutal ode to Navy SEALs and a faithful depiction of the moral confusion of combat.
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