Lone Survivor doesn't look much like your usual end-of-year awards hopeful, a war movie crammed with action scenes and stars like Mark Wahlberg and Taylor Kitsch. But the buzz surrounding the next film from Peter Berg suggests Lone Survivor might be worthy after all. Due in theaters on December 27, Lone Survivor recounts the true story of what happened on June 28, 2005, when Seal Team 10 attempted to capture a Taliban leader and encountered deadly obstacles in the process. And as you can see in the latest trailer, which you can watch in high-res at Apple, something as simple as sparing the life of a innocent kid can be the one mistake that causes true disaster.
As you can tell from the pull-quotes featured in this trailer, from the likes of Bill Simmons and Peter Travers, The Lone Survivor isn't your average war movie, and may serve as a kind of redemption for both its director and one of its stars. No, I don't mean Mark Wahlberg-- he made a masterpiece this year already, remember?-- but Taylor Kitsch, who with director Peter Berg brought upon the world last year's Battleship. There's no better way to recover from an expensive stumble than to stick the landing on the next go-round, and Berg-- who made one very good war film already with The Kingdom-- seems to have taken that to heart. It's hard to get into the macho balance of humor and action within a single trailer, but I like what we're seeing here. If it's a lot of watching Kitsch and Wahlberg rib each other, with a little bit of action thrown in, that's actually perfectly fine.
Berg explained more about what he's doing with Lone Survivor in a recent behind-the-scenes featurette, which you can also watch below. In addition to Kitsch and Wahlberg the cast includes Ben Foster, Eric Bana, Jerry Ferrara (a.k.a. Entourage's Turtle), Alexander Ludwig (Cato of The Hunger Games) and Emile Hirsch, which makes it at the very least a showcase for a lot of young actors who deserve good work. Whether we can find them amid the chaos and bullets of war is something we'll have to wait until December 27 to see in action.
