with the cast and crew as they discuss training for the film, the rapid production schedule, the cameras, the weapons and the action. He provides a lot of fun behind-the-scenes and technical information about the filmmaking process.Ī look at the making of the film. He talks about reworking the script, assembling the cast and crew, and the various filming locations.
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He describes how he wanted to make a mission-based war movie without any political statement or the drama of a soldier coming home from the war. Roel Reiné, the director/cinematographer of the film, provides an interesting running commentary on the film.
The DVD also contains a nice collection of behind-the-scenes interviews and bonus features spread across 3 featurettes and an audio commentary. The picture and sound quality on the DVD was quite good, capturing all of the action both visually and aurally. However, I found it really odd that there was absolutely no mention of those who didn’t survive the mission! It’s like he was really going for this detachment from death that a video game battle provides. In the commentary, the director states that he didn’t want the film to be about the drama of soldiers coming home from war. Even in the final scene, the soldiers are having fun and never once mention their fallen comrades. While the men deal with loss of a soldier in one scene, the rest of the time, there is no mourning whatsoever. The film seems focused more on giving non-stop action, and as a result the falls a bit flat when it comes to dialogue and character development, and any twists in the plot were easily predicted. And the final stand-off with the villainous Malin is even more cartoony. The scene felt like something out of The Walking Dead season 1 if the zombies were all given machetes and machine guns. Somehow not one of these folks manages to hit their target, even as this soldier stops running to take out many of them. It felt like a separate film of its own-it follows one soldier making his way through the city streets as literally hundreds of armed villagers chase after him. In the bonus features, the director states how he always wanted to make an urban shootout film, and that is what we get in this final act. The final act, while action-packed, didn’t really fit with the rest of the film. It seemed like every time someone was firing a gun or a rocket launcher, we had to see those bullets flying in slow motion.
However, during some of the scenes, there is excessive use of slow-motion. Besides the initial raid, there are several other exciting action sequences including a high-speed boat chase and bridge shootout. There is constant gunfire and explosions and you feel this chaos of the battle. As the soldiers make their initial advance on General Tonga’s compound there are a several first-person shooter style shots where you see the gun in front of you with the POV of that soldier running into battle.įor the most part, the action is really well done. For better or for worse, he has succeeded in that respect-at times it does feel like you are watching an action-packed video game. The director states several times in the DVD’s bonus material that he was aiming for a film that would appeal to the 16-year-old who loves playing Call of Duty and Battlefield-he wanted to make a mission-based war film. While the film is the fourth in the Behind Enemy Lines franchise, there is no real connection between this and any of the previous films. Now they only have 36 hours to discover the identity of Malin and stop a huge sale of uranium, but with their communications cut off, these five soldiers are stuck behind enemy lines with no way to call for backup. However, after locating the asset, they soon discover that the so-called military camp is actually a uranium mining operation run by the mysterious and unknown “Malin”. Navy chief Ricks (Tom Sizemore) assembles a team of Seals to enter the camp and extract the hostages so that the CIA can level the camp. A CIA asset (Aurélie Meriel) and her handler are taken captive in the Congo, and are being held at a military training camp affiliated with Al-Qaeda, run by the ruthless General Tonga (Leroy Gopal).