Powerful, terrifying and soulful, this real-life Hurt Locker is an intimate, often brilliant insight into combat and comradeship.
Built around hand-held reportage, the film passes no judgement on the rightness or otherwise of the occupation. But the sense of bewilderment and futility speaks for itself.
Restrepo gazes unflinchingly on those at the heart of a contentious conflict and renders their experience viscerally and – most importantly – humanely.
In the end what you take away from Restrepo is a war where people came to conquer, but left to reflect.
Restrepo gives a fresh perspective on the conflict through its unflinching front-line footage which focuses on the daily life of the US soldiers fighting in the country.
It is hard to know which is more horrifying, the soldiers thrown to sudden death like pieces of meat to an animal, or the soldiers who find excitement in being shot at.
Anyone who thrilled to the rawness of Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker will get a kick out of this documentary.
It is a scary, moving and troubling film.
It's all strong, visceral stuff and about as far removed from a traditional Hollywood war movie as you can get.
An air of futility seeps through, though as a document of comradeship under fire this is unexpectedly moving.
(An) exemplary documentary...
Restrepo is light on politics but it does a heavyweight job of showing that war is hell – not least for the civilians caught in the middle.
What gives the film added depth is the way they intercut the action (and the tedium) of day-to-day combat with raw, unsentimental, after-the-fact testimony from the surviving soldiers as they try to process what they went through and what their mission meant to them – both at the time and with the benefit of hindsight.
Restrepo: Is this the greatest war film ever?
Jonathan Owen and Matthew Bell, The Independent on Sunday, 10/10/2010
General release. Check local listings for show times.
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