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20 Military members on my Base were granted tickets to see a screening of this film, set to be released in Early February. The rest of the theatre was packed with Special Operations members from Southern Command. To say that the movie theatre was packed with a whole lot of whoopass, would be an understatement.

The characters in the film are portrayed by 'actual' active duty US Navy Seals, not actors. (The most incredible human beings on the planet) The story is fiction, but the special effects, the tactics and the weapons are 100% real.

The acting portion of the film, in the start mostly, was a bit weak. To be expected when you realize that these are real life Navy Seals. The character development was also a little rushed. With that said.. This was the best military movie I have ever seen. It doesn't even come close. Absolutely fantastic, I was also surprised to find myself in tears towards the end of the movie. I highly recommend this movie when it comes out. Because of how this movie was made, it's like nothing else I have seen.

:devil

This film brought to you by the Ministry of Information?

Your typical special forces movie, I liked GI Jane better...

Doubt this will surpass Saving Private Ryan or anything on that level.

I explained from the get go Ibudin, it's better because it's real. The Actors in this movie are REAL Navy Seal service members. The explosions, tactics, the weaponry, is all REAL shit and tactics used by the navy Seals. This movie isn't just a go to the theater movie, it's a military experience. It was fucking awesome.

:devil

Real explosions by real people, I can't wait to see this. Thanks Trikki.

I think what she's getting at is this: When you're military and you go watch a movie you have to unplug your brain a bit because you will otherwise spend the next 1-2 hours nitpicking everything that is wrong with the movie and how they portray it on the big screen because even with military advisors, it gets so "hollywooded" up that it's unbelievable.

But since the guys in the movie were running the show on a lot of it, it's more true to life, and therefore less brain-unplugging is necessary for us.

Saw this on Wednesday. Pretty underwhelming waste of taxpayer money. You've already paid for it once, don't make the mistake of paying again by going to see this in theaters.

Saw this on Wednesday. Pretty underwhelming waste of taxpayer money. You've already paid for it once, don't make the mistake of paying again by going to see this in theaters.

What don't you like about this movie? The acting? The special effects? Combat?

Actors = Active Duty Navy Seals
Special Effects = 100% real.
Combat = 100% real combat techniques.

This might appeal to the military community more than the civilians..

:devil

I saw it at the Pentagon in a special screening, and there certainly were some military folks there who went ape shit over it. Obviously its going to appeal more to military people because that's the whole gimmick they are selling you. But, a lot of the people who did see it (enlisted service persons, mind you) were quite disappointed because it was only the gimmick and very little substance.

For one, there is a reason people pay professional actors for movies. The acting was horrible. This was probably the main reason that most critics who saw this movie gave it a pretty horrible score (19% top critics on rotten tomatoes, 42/100 on metacritic). All of the lines were given fairly flat and it really pulled you out of the movie with how unrealistic it all sounded. I'm sure they all are amazing service members and that they are amazing at what they do, they just aren't amazing service members and amazing actors.

As for your special effects claim, that is entirely false. They used live rounds in scant few of the scenes. I promise you, the squibs exploding on the terrorist's chests weren't actual bullets being shot through actual terrorists. Danny Cangemi, the special effects coordinator, also coordinated the special effects for Star Trek and Transformers and Spider Man (and no, in those movies there weren't real spaceships firing real photon cannons). There was CGI in places, an army of stunt personnel, and plenty of visual effects. The reality is, real explosions look stupidly small on film. There is both a level of expectation and even an issue with film latitude not being able to show you all of the colors you would see in reality. You can't do a movie like this without special effects, and its silly to assume they did.

The last issue I had was with the story. I don't want to give it away because I'm sure a lot of you will like to see it, but not only was it extremely cliche but the whole film just really lacked a soul and felt flat. I don't know if that was the Pentagon's meddling and bureaucracy that killed it off along the way, or if el Bandito just didn't have the experience to pull this off. We'll see if they do better with the Governator next year.

I wanted to like it because our service members have taken some flack over the past few years due to the poor decisions of our leaders, and seeing it in a room full of wounded service members and their families (and getting paid to do it) was going to be a pretty great day at the office. However, someone really screwed the pooch along the way.

The story likely felt flat because it was ghost-written by one of Tom Clancy's pool of hacks that have been churning out military porn under his name for the last ten years.

Get any Marine Force Recon member to talk and they'll tell ya they do everything the SEALs do, with equipment 10 years older. Get an Army Rangers to talk and they'll tell you that SEALs are great at performing missions based on intel shoulder surfed from their army techs. The difficult part is getting any of them to talk.

Was great, but not "saving private Ryan" good.

Better than Saving Private Ryan? We watched different films I think ...

Read my comment again, I know media is your field and all(reading comprehension) but I am pretty sure I agree with you :p

Ah. Was reading on a small screen.

That being said, up until now good has universally been worse than great.

context fail there kelraz. "Great" in the first sentence is a description with meaning as you described, where "good" and "great" are the items on the scale of measurement. But "good" in the second sentence was describing the measurement scale (that being "on the scale of goodness", where movies were the descriptors of position on the scale. The Greatness scale obviously has larger denominations than the good scale, so things measured in great clearly tend to be on the extreme high end of a good scale.

Now if I can understand all that context without having it spelled out for me, you aught to be more careful with your snark /fails. Especially being in the communications field. That's two for two, now. :P

Finally got around to watching this. It was about as preposterous as expected, although the attention to technical detail was nice. Probably would have been better for "character development" (generously described) if they'd left out the rah-rah-America-freedom' lovin' with my blond wife making mah baby in the kitchen ridiculous dialogue and just stuck with a few of the more ruminate reflections.

Comically, one of the character asks a great question about 3/4ths in, "Hey, when'd we get clearance to go to Mexicali?" -- because the entire rest of the movie is basically a war crime documentary in which US forces illegally enter multiple sovereign nations, kill random non-US citizens extra-legally, and kidnap a Russian national on the high seas. The whole element of "all the impossibly clever brown people have elaborate plots to kill you, thank god you're spending so many trillions on blowing them up" was a little nauseating at times.

Fantastic sound work though.