Come Back to Afghanistan Blog #4

I thought that Lions for Lambs was an exceptionally well-done movie. I loved the way the filmmakers had three entirely separate plots with the same main ideas all cut up into segments and happening at the same time. It made the film much more suspenseful because just as a scene had a new idea introduced, it switched to a different story, and every time you really got your head planted in that story and were waiting for the ending, the other story you had been watching ten minutes ago would elaborate on the idea it had introduced that long ago. The thing I especially enjoyed was the way that the filmmakers portrayed the ending where the two soldiers and best friends were shot by the Taliban. When they were in the process of being machine-gunned to death, each flash of the gun showed a different scene of their lives as best friends and students. This really made me feel mournful for them because they had taken the risk of joining the army and had been sacrificed in the process of trying to liberate Afghanistan, all thanks to faulty information about a mountaintop the troops were supposed to land on top of. The thing that really bothered me was the way the senator had decided to sacrifice noble men and women who did not know that they would be treated as a scapegoat for the “real” troops to go in and help rebuild Afghanistan. I thought that although he had attended West Point and graduated in the tiptop of his class, he didn’t know how terrifying and horrible war could be. He decided in his nice, cozy office in Washington, D.C. that he would have to take the risk and kill off hundreds of officers that willingly enrolled in the army who hoped they would make a difference. In a sense, they did make a difference by dying for their country and for the mission the senator put into action, but they didn’t make the kind of difference they were expecting to make. It disgusted me how the senator could make that kind of decision in order to make a “necessary sacrifice.” But, overall, I loved the film and hope I get a chance to see it again and better analyze it.