Restrepo Movie Responses

2.  I think the director's choice of intermingling individual interviews with long periods of unedited footage was important for the theme or message of the documentary to be carried across.  First, this technique of excluding an outside narrative voice, and instead using interviews and experiences of soldiers as narration helps the viewer be thrust into war in the way the soldiers were.  As viewers, we come in knowing scarcely anything about the Korengal Valley, just as the soldiers are dropped in like gamepieces to a violent situation, and are forced to adapt.  Also, the choice helps tell the story of the platoon's experiences in the Korengal be complete.  The unedited footage shows the true, uncensored experience of war and its impact on the people involved in the immediate.  However, the interviews are critical for reflection upon deeper meaning into these blurred experiences, that is necessary to completely tell theme and story in Restrepo.  The interviews look into how the experience affected each individual in unique ways, illustrating the inevitable impact it has on lives after the war.  The looking back on it, as Vonnegut argues, is part of what makes us human, and part of the story of war that needs to be told.
3.  Restrepo's platoon faced myriad ongoing challenges in the Korengal Valley in achieving the American agenda.  Perhaps the greatest one was fear.  Fear discouraged troops from fighting and intruding into their enemy's territory; they knew the entire valley was characterized by violence.  Yet fear also made it difficult to overcome biases that might have led to more death -- causing brash actions in revenge that would lead to more death.  Another challenge was pain.  The movie's namesake, after all, Restrepo, is the name of a soldier who died fighting.  A couple of other soldiers were injured or killed, and the soldiers had to be mentally tough to persevere in carrying out the American agenda.  Captain Kearney persuades these soldiers to overcome death and sadness by transforming it into fire against the enemy.  A last challenge could be differences.  Throughout the film, soldiers needed to adopt a unified mindset and follow orders so they would not be killed.  This did cause some backlash.  The platoon needed to become a family.  Yet an even greater challenge was that of working with local elders, who shared different mindsets on the issue than the American soldiers.  The Americans had to realize that the fear of the Taliban was great for the village people, and that cooperation with them was going to be difficult because of threats they had received.  Tension also rose when innocent civilians were injured by Americans.
7.  The showing of the soldiers' individual faces at the end of the film was sobering.  The silence conveyed the idea that sometimes, in the midst of great tragedy and slaughter -- an idea present in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five -- there is nothing sensible that can be said.  The silence is imposed by fate.  The pictures showed so much more than words, here.  The faces showed, anguish, grief, stoicism, and regret, all conditions of war.  It also pointed again to the importance of the individual, in the face of the mob mentality nature of war.  The viewer could see the pain of every individual, and it had the effect of breeding empathy.  The scene showed the humanness of people involved in war, which is important for the viewer to recognize.