Like Gunner Palace, this war documentary is satisfied with its amazing access. Embedded with an American platoon at a vulnerable outpost in a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan valley, directors Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger capture the chaos and camaraderie that alternately ravages these young soldiers’ psyches and keeps them sane. But I wish it had gone deeper. Considering Junger is the adventure journalist behind bestsellers such as “The Perfect Storm,” Restrepo is frustratingly short on details – why do many of the village elders appear to have dyed their beards a blazing red, for instance? The soldiers, meanwhile, remain at a distance; in the talking head interview scenes with the survivors, they mostly use military speak that could be pulled from recruitment brochures. Restrepo is still valuable in the way it raises awareness – you can see in the eyes of these American kids that they’re damaged, while the images of maimed Afghan children question the morality of remote air strikes – but in a way the movie is doubly dispiriting. The war in Afghanistan comes off as fruitless, while Junger and Hetherington miss a golden opportunity to intersect access and art.
