Cut to Prince and Bambi back home in the US, who discover from a CIA source not only that Amber has been abducted and her colleagues executed but she’s working for the CIA, most likely gathering data on guerrilla armies, drug cartels and/or other groups noted for their lack of appreciation of nosy Yanks in their jungly ambits. When they search Amber’s bags and find a military grade tracking device put there by her concerned husband, their suspicions are aroused. They’re equivalent to the earlier Taliban in having no individuation or comprehensible motivation. “You could be the new Timothy Leary,” says her professor to his top student before she leaves the lab to fly out to Colombia to conduct research into why shamans don’t get addicted to local psychedelic fauna.īut just as she and her fellow scientists are happily gathering hallucinogens and tripping with local shamans on the Colombia-Venezuela border, a gang of tooled-up guerrillas arrive in their campsite. She is a world-renowned scientist working at the cutting edge of psychedelic pharmaceuticals. Amber, we abruptly learn, is not what she seems, but a protagonist in her own right. Essentially it’s an amalgam of The Deer Hunter, Band of Brothers, Phil and Grant’s sibling rivalry in EastEnders plus a sexy stay-at-home bride doomed to moon tearfully out of windows while her men straighten out Johnny Foreigner. In the resultant firefight, Prince gets separated from his unit and needs rescuing by Bambi, with tragic consequences that leave each staring crossly at each other at later social events back home. Their mission? To free Americans, and take out any Taliban in their way. “Wheels up in eight hours,” shouts their commander to Bambi, Prince and the rest of the unit at the wedding reception. You bring him home.” His resolve is quickly tested. Minutes earlier, back in the US at Prince and Amber’s wedding, Amber tells her brother he’d better keep on eye on her man on any future missions: “He’s not just a guy in your unit. Prince is a posh boy designated to become a senator and apt to go rogue in combat Bambi a straight shooter and, like his beloved sister, Amber, self-identifies as a red-neck Kentuckian. The aforementioned firefight is narrative pretext to punch up fateful tensions in Prince and Bambi’s relationship, what scriptwriting gurus call the inciting incident. Boal made an award-winning name for himself with Kathryn Bigelow-directed movies The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty which, though purportedly about foreign conflict, depicted America at war with itself and with its foreign policies (the former dramatised a bomb disposal unit in Iraq, the latter the hunt for Bin Laden). Mark Boal’s screenplay is adapted from the 2018 Israeli TV series When Heroes Fly (available on Netflix) which itself was adapted from Amir Gutfreund’s bestselling novel about military veterans on a rescue mission to Colombia. Instead of hoping our white saviours will make it home, maybe it would be nice if their nameless foes of colour, just for once, make it to the end credits. Or possibly it’s because this is another culturally colonialist production in which we’re supposed to empathise with western heroes’ psychodramas as they face off against underscripted others – think American Vietnam movies, Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, Homeland.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |