The Mountain II

The Mountain II (2016) is the most watched Turkish war film and was made four years after the first. Oğuz and Bekir survived a snowbound mountain in the original. Here they are members of a special forces unit going out on their first field assignment. The difference between the two films is visible in the budget. The first was made for a hundred and seventy thousand lira; this one had one million seven hundred thousand, ten times as much. With special permission from the Turkish Armed Forces, Alper Çağlar used real, domestically produced weapons and armoured military vehicles. Çağlar has said the edit alone took four months, and it shows: the geography of the firefights is followable and you always know who is where. That is not common in Turkish action cinema. It was the most watched film in Turkey in 2016, selling three million six hundred thousand tickets and taking over forty million lira. It is also contested. The heroism runs high and the opposing side is not written as individuals; this is not a critique of war but openly a mission film. It should be watched with that in mind. It runs 135 minutes. Good for: action, war films, and Turkish cinema. Less good for: the violence is very graphic, there are torture scenes, and the political register is not neutral.