Review: Korengal
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
[Grade: B] Built with remarkable footage left over from the creation of 2010’s Restrepo, Korengal should be viewed more as a companion to that Oscar-nominated doc than as a sequel.
City Paper grade: B
Built with remarkable footage left over from the creation of 2010’s Restrepo, Korengal should be viewed more as a companion to that Oscar-nominated doc than as a sequel, even if it deals more with what’s underneath the infantry helmets than the bullets whizzing past them. Sebastian Junger, taking over sole directorial duties from late partner Tim Hetherington (who was killed covering Libya in 2011), takes the focus away from the firefights and places it on the men fighting them. Posted in Afghanistan’s “Valley of Death,” the American troops battling Taliban forces experience extreme highs and numbing lows, fueled by adrenaline one second, atrophied by boredom the next (“100 miles an hour to a dead halt”). The binding power of brotherhood is what each soldier, granted dimension through raw and oft-uncomfortable interviews, emphasizes above everything else, and there’s true purity in their dedication to each other. But Junger never sidesteps the more sinister psychological realities of combat — the fixation on violence, the permanence of guilt — that have deeply skewed the perspectives of his subjects. The work comes off incomplete as a standalone feature, but paired with Restrepo, it’s clearly some of the finest unvarnished wartime journalism of our lifetime.
