Special Forces

A French action film set in Afghanistan. Elsa is a journalist. She works in the region and wrote a piece; the piece targets a local commander. She is taken. Along with her interpreter. Her captors release a video. A deadline is given. The French army sends a unit. A six-man special forces team. The raid is made and the woman is freed. The problem starts there. The helicopter cannot come and the team is stranded in the mountains. From there the film is a story about walking. Towards the Pakistani border, on foot, with an armed group behind them. The road is long. Snow, rock, thirst and night. The team shrinks. The narrative gives the losses one by one and enlarges none of them. Elsa is a burden at first. She cannot walk, falls behind, and the soldiers do not like it. Then it changes. She learns to walk and becomes part of the team. What the narrative is interested in is not war but carrying: its idea is that the job of six soldiers amounts to taking one person from one place to another, and what that costs. Politics is outside the narrative. The film never enters the reasons for the conflict, and that reads as a shortcoming too. The landscape dominates. It was shot in Tajikistan and the altitude is in the images. There is little dialogue. The team does not talk much and the characters are defined in short sentences. Diane Kruger, Djimon Hounsou, Benoît Magimel, Denis Ménochet and Raphaël Personnaz are in the cast. Stéphane Rybojad directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes military action and survival narratives. Who it is not for: anyone looking for depth; the characters are thin, the narrative runs on one line, and the last section is predictable.