The Kill Team

This film tells the story of a young soldier who battles with himself on whether to follow the dubious orders of his sergeant.

The story is well told, as it highlights the battles of the young soldier. The intimidation by the sergeant is portrayed effectively, making the young soldier crack and fear for his own safety. It is very sad that the young soldier had to endure such an ordeal.

I attended two films in a row suffering from exactly the same flaw: the main protagonist left at the climax with no choice, cancelling out any previous drama in the story. First up was "Mickey and the Bear", where the heroine was faced with choosing between staying with her messed-up war vet of a father to care for him, or getting on with her own life by going away to college.

Then came "The Kill Team", a standard-issue anti-war movie whose hero is faced with becoming a whistle blower and putting an end to the murderous activities of his squad in Afghanistan, or becoming part of the killing team. As directed by Dan Krauss, who previously treated the same material to a documentary feature, we can identify with the kid put in a tough situation, but the real-life plot twist after the film's climax robs him of choice, making this just another slice-of-life reality downer.

There are many important issues raised along the way, especially how the military is designed to dehumanize young recruits in order to get them to carry out dangerous missions, as well as numerous side issues like bullying, indoctrination and even the strong effects of violent videogames on an impressionable youngster's psyche, but the crisis of conscience at the center of the story is presented more like a rat in a trap than a potential profile in courage. Worse yet, the key scene involving the killing of an innocent old Afghani civilian is staged so poorly that I couldn't follow clearly exactly what happened, only to witness the hero becoming implicated in the evil around him.

Alexander Skarsgard is fine as the nominal villain of a ruthless squad sergeant, while Nat Wolff as the hero remains a blank throughout. It's a role reminiscent of many that Tom Courtenay delivered brilliantly in the 1960s,/70s, ranging from "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" to "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", his tortured expressions conveying his situational pain as perhaps no other actor could. But even though we can vicariously, from the safety of our cinema seat far from war, identify with Wolff's Andrew Briggman, by film's end this is just another piece of escapism, in which the viewer can go home with a "Whew!", thanking God that one doesn't find oneself in Briggman's predicament.

There is a lot of tension in this film, as a young American soldier in Afghanistan finds that his sergeant wants to make his team do unacceptable things. There are issues of conscience, obviously, but the story also touches the difficulty of breaking rank, reporting anything above your superior officer, behaving differently than your teammates, the casual bullying in the army and the general apathy regarding due process or anything other than the blind discipline required of military people.

The story in the film is based on the Maywand District murders, about which the writer/director of the film also talked in a documentary from 2013 that he also directed.

But while the story is important, the movie is not that great. Alexander Skarsgård does his charismatic yet dangerous guy role, and Nat Wolff did a good job with the main character, but the rest of the plot felt either rushed, or disjointed or plain bland. It really felt like a prolonged dream sequence. I rather preferred the two actors in The Stand. The other actors had almost nothing to work with. There was very little characterisation, even for the two lead actors.

Sometimes it is hard to bring real life cases to the big screen and also make them entertaining. Perhaps there was not much to tell other than what was in the film, perhaps the respect of the author for the facts prohibited him to add the usual bull that people add to create tension, release it, bring humor, make greater than life characters out of ordinary people. In the end, though, I felt uncomfortable with the tension, disconnected from the situation and caring very little about the characters.

I don't want to give any spoilers so I'll just say this movie had the right story, the right actors, the right setting to be something special but the whole film came out shallow & flat imo. It just seemed like a paint by numbers production. The battle or military sequences could've been more broad or involved. They could've included the trials & news coverage or the impact this story had on the country or military but didn't.

When the movie ended & went to credits I said to myself: 'is that it?' Evidently it was & it just wasn't good enough imo.

This was a decent effort elevated by Alexander Skarsgard who plays low key menacing so well. There was a strong sense of the dilemma our lead young soldier felt as he wrestles between doing the right thing and fitting in with his team. The film feels very claustrophobic and it seemed like a realistic portrait of a powerless and lonely existence on the bottom rung of the US Army.