7 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Korengal picks up where Restrepo left off; the same men, the same valley, the same commanders, but a very different look at the experience of war.
Starring: Miguel Cortez, Dan Kearney, Sterling Jones (III), Brendan O'Byrne, Misha Pemble-BelkinWar | 100% |
Documentary | 82% |
History | 72% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.78:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 4.5 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 3.5 | |
Extras | 3.5 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Korengal is a sequel to the Oscar-nominated 2010 documentary Restrepo by war correspondents Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington. Restrepo was the product of over a year of living alongside the U.S. soldiers assigned to a remote outpost in Afghanistan, accompanying them on missions and sharing their hardships. The outpost was named after medic Juan Restrepo, a beloved member of the company who was one of the unit's first casualties. It was a rough encampment that had been arduously dug out of high ground in the Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan, which was the scene of some of the war's heaviest fighting and a key area for disrupting enemy supply lines. With no running water and zero amenities (except what could be flown in by helicopter), the outpost was positioned as bait. By drawing Taliban fire away from the nearby Pech District, it facilitated the building of schools, hospitals and other productive activities intended to benefit the civilian population. By combining documentary footage from the deployment with interviews taken immediately after the soldiers' tour had ended, Restrepo attempted to capture, as the two directors said at the time, "the experience of combat, boredom and fear through the eyes of the soldiers themselves. Their lives were our lives: we did not sit down with their families, we did not interview Afghans, we did not explore geopolitical debates. Soldiers are living and fighting and dying at remote outposts in Afghanistan in conditions that few Americans back home can imagine. Their experiences are important to understand, regardless of one's political beliefs." After the release of Restrepo in 2010, however, Junger believed there was more to say. By then, the U.S. military had abandoned its position in the Korengal Valley; Korengal opens with the destruction of Outpost Restrepo, so that nothing would be left for the enemy. Some of the soldiers who appeared in Restrepo left the Army and returned home, while others moved on to other deployments. Junger himself experienced an intense emotional, one might almost say spiritual, conversion, that led him to abandon war reporting after twenty years. He began analyzing the experience of war, not just in Afghanistan but in general, and began questioning whether the much-publicized difficulties of so many combat veterans in adjusting to civilian life could so easily be written off under the convenient label of "PTSD". Combing through the extensive footage unused in Restrepo, Junger saw the outlines of a new chapter in the story. Korengal suffered a setback when Junger's co-director and collaborator, Tim Hetherington, was killed in April 2011 while covering the civil war in Libya. Despite this personal and professional loss, Junger persevered. Hetherington's voice can still be heard off-camera in many interviews; his extensive involvement remains an essential part of the film; and his picture is the last to appear after the final credits.
Unlike its predecessor, Restrepo, which was encoded on Blu- ray at 1080i with MPEG-2, Korengal benefits from a 1080p, AVC-encoded presentation by Virgil Films, but the documentary's video quality is still limited by its source material. For all of the scenes and interviews shot on location at Outpost Restrepo and in the Korengal Valley, filming was handheld and limited to available light, and the image is sometimes unavoidably distorted and noisy beyond any ability of post-production manipulation to clean it up. The weakest moments are those taken directly from GoPro cameras in the helmets of soldiers on maneuvers, plus a few short clips of video obtained from the Taliban, which are blurry but chilling, because they show an assault on an American outpost from the enemy's perspective. The interviews taken after the deployment are sharp, clear and well-framed, with solid black backgrounds and professional lighting; it's here that the Blu-ray's true quality can be seen most clearly. Source material with imperfections is often more difficult to reproduce accurately than footage that's crystal clear, and Virgil Films has mastered the 85-minute Korengal with a relatively high bitrate of 27.91 Mbps, which is certainly sufficient to avoid adding to the challenges of the material with compression issues.
The lossy audio included with Restrepo was effective at conveying the fury of battle, but Korengal has few battle scenes to challenge its two lossless audio tracks, a 5.1 and a 2.0, both in DTS-HD MA. A few short scenes of the base defending itself against attack are outdone by a segment in which interviewees discuss which weapon is their favorite (with appropriate scenes capturing the sound of each). A nearby detonation during maneuvers strikes with intense force, but the point of the scene is to show how experienced soldiers don't react to anything that isn't an immediate threat. The voices of the interviewees are always clear, as are those not being interviewed but simply interacting at the base (including the full range of profanity, for those with small children in the house). Marty Beller of the band They Might Be Giants wrote the effective score.
When I reviewed Restrepo for another site, I opined that it would be essential material for future historians of the war in Afghanistan. Korengal adds to that record, but its focus puts this film closer to the fictional depictions that have portrayed how war transforms individuals: works like The Hurt Locker, Platoon, La Grande Illusion or The Big Parade (to remain strictly in cinema; the literary canon would be enormous). The fact that Korengal is a documentary rather than a work of fiction makes it somewhat less focused and neatly organized, because facts never lay themselves out as precisely as a script, but Junger's film also has an authenticity that no fictional work could ever claim. Virgil Films' Blu-ray presentation is technically proficient and highly recommended.
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