It feels real.įor one hundred excruciatingly tense minutes, this film conscripts you into one of the British Army’s elite units. The parallels one can find between Junger’s documentaries and Katis’s film are Kilo Two Bravo’s center of gravity: authenticity. If you liked Sebastian Junger’s documentary films Restrepo or Korengal, you will feel the same about Kilo Two Bravo. My net assessment: Kilo Two Bravo is real, experiential, and reveals a truth about modern combat that is too often MIA in big budgeted Hollywood productions where the bullets are never-ending and the wounds are never-beginning.
Kilo Two Bravo is the directorial debut of Paul Katis, which has earned him a nomination for a British Academy Film Award. Instead they set off a landmine and subsequently struggle to limit the damage and save the wounded. The film adapts the true story of a small British Army unit (call sign: “Kilo Two Bravo”), part of the 3 rd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, that goes on a mission to shut down a Taliban checkpoint in September 2006. Kilo Two Bravo is the Americanized title of the British film Kajaki, originally released in the United Kingdom last year. And anyone with an interest in understanding war should buy an advance ticket. While the inhospitable peaks and vanishing air of a Park City or Mars might be out of reach, the film Kilo Two Bravo, which comes out in American theaters next month, is a one-way pass to the ever-frustrating experience of modern combat.
And if you live next to the Kajaki Dam in southern Afghanistan, your problem is surviving a Soviet minefield.
If you live on Mars, you’re concerned about growing potatoes with your own poop. If you live in Park City, you’re worried about a fungus that dampens fall aspen colors.