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Plot Summary
Korengal picks up where Restrepo left off; the same men, the same valley, the same commanders, but a very different look at the experience of war. Korengal explains how war works, what it feels like and what it does to the young men who fight it. As one soldier cheers when he kills an enemy fighter, another looks into the camera and asks if God will ever forgive him for all of the killing he has done. As one soldier grieves the loss of his friend in combat, another explains why he misses the war now that his deployment has ended, and admits he would go back to the front line in a heartbeat. Every bit as intense and affecting as Restrepo, Korengal goes a step further in bringing the war into people's living rooms back home.
Rotten Tomatoes Movie Reviews
TOMATOMETER
85%- Reviews Counted: 34
- Fresh: 29
- Rotten: 5
- Average Rating: 6.4/10
Top Critics' Reviews
Fresh: "Korengal" is a collective meditation on military life by many of the same men, looking back on their time in Afghanistan.
Fresh: Sebastian Junger delivers a worthy companion piece to 'Restrepo' with this more reflective dispatch from the front lines of Afghanistan.
Fresh: The focus is on the psychology of wartime existence, descriptions of sights, sounds and feelings, girded by the verite footage rather than driven by it.
Rotten: Korengal deals with memories rather than realities, and yet leaves those memories unexamined.
Customer Reviews
Nothing New
Ok, first off being a veteran doing deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan some of what was going on with these soldiers I could relate to. Sadly I'm sick of the cheap promotion of what happen over in Afghanistan. It's bad enough to watch soldiers not wearing full issued gear which we trained with pre-deployment stage but during their deployment they thought the were back in Vietnam. This movie is only going to encourage stolen valor impostors out their trying to act like they are soldiers in the United States Army doing this and that. To veterans, reserve/NG, or active duty who have deployed to Afghanistan you might find this movie moving rather slow at some points and annoyed at some soldiers being overly emotionally at some points in this movie. I wouldn't even recommend this movie to basic training soldiers and incoming soldiers to their new duty station which would give then wrong impression what right and wrong looks like.
Realities?
This is what war feels like? There are WWII, Korea and Vietnam vets who would beg to differ with you. Wars are fought against armies, not sporadic civilians hiding in hills. Gorilla warfare, maybe. When you lose 2,300 men in one month, 7,000 in less than a year - that’s war. I found this film boring and slow. I kept asking myself, what are they doing there? Is anything being accomplished? When you’ve been surrounded by 1,200 of the enemy and you lose 250 of your closest friends in two to three days - that’s what war is, and war feels like.
War from a Soldier's Perspective
I watched this movie because I absolutely loved "Restrepo" and Junger's book "War." I didn't really know what to expect- it's a lot of the same guys from Restrepo and instead of focusing on the mission, they talked a little more in depth about how their time in the Korengal Valley changed them. Definitely recommend this to anyone who wants a perspective on how Soldiers think and feel in combat theaters. The only piece I would like to have seen in this movie is the afterward- what happened to these guys when they either PCS'd to different duty stations or exited the military?
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