BEFORE: Well, it's a very obvious theme for the week, it comes down to people putting their lives on the line to defend our country, whether that's soldiers or firemen or secret agents. I'm starting with the "based on a true story" ones, and by the end of the week I'll be on the very fictional spy stuff, namely the new "Mission: Impossible" movie. Those are always more on the unbelievable side of things, with the crazy "false face" disguises and the wild stunts.
But I'm still in the "this really happened" mode, with this film about a real group of firefighters, and James Badge Dale carries over from "13 Hours".
THE PLOT: Based on the true story of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, a group of elite firefighters who risk everything to protect a town from a historic wildfire.
AFTER: There are many similarities to last night's film, both this and "13 Hours" depict a group of men in danger, working as a team, developing that sense of camaraderie that comes from being in the trenches together, facing a common enemy. Only instead of a fire-fight with bullets, tonight it's the other kind, against fire. And usually that famous expression about "fighting fire with fire" doesn't seem to make much sense (People could say, "it's time to fight fire...with water" but that just doesn't seem very dramatic. Quite practical, though.) that's exactly what these Hotshots do, they perform controlled burns in the forest to create a barrier that the fire can't cross, because it's already burned. When done properly, it's apparently quite effective for keeping a wildfire contained.
It's certainly more practical than keeping all of America's forest land well-raked, as our Nutjob-in-Chief suggested in response to last year's California wildfires. According to him, it's what they do in Finland to cut down on forest fires, and the fact that it snows 11 months out of the year there, and the temperature is often sub-zero has nothing to do with their lack of spontaneous wildfires. Right. But by all means, let's pay some people to rake all the forests in California, only that's not a practical task, and even if it were, good luck finding people to do it, my guess is you'd probably have to hire immigrants to do it, because Millennials won't do manual labor, but good luck with THAT after you build your wall. OK, maybe we can get convicts to rake the forest, but then you'd lose a few of them after they hide behind trees.
But I'm digressing again. Just as it takes a certain sort of man to be a soldier (sorry, independent military contractor working for the CIA) it takes a certain sort of man to be a firefighter, and it takes another sort of man to be a wildfire-fighter, or a "HotShot". The name sort of says it all, at least for these "type 1" firefighters who work hard, play hard, play pranks on each other, and are somewhat self-destructive. The film comes close to suggesting that this is a job commonly held by more than one ex-addict, who maybe in getting themselves clean from drugs needed some other kind of thrill, and is getting some kind of high from the adrenaline rush of fighting wildfires, combined with the endorphins released from all that manual labor, perhaps. For others it seems to be the last chance to succeed at something, if they dropped out of school, or got arrested, or had some relationship problems, or some combination of all three.
(Some military films are built around the same premise - that it's the poor, dumb and desperate who end up enlisting and fighting overseas, because they've got nowhere else to turn, and serving their country is maybe their last chance to straighten up and fly right. Oh, if only they could end up as part of a ragtag unit that succeeds in a battle, against unlikely odds...)
These are all stereotypes, of course, but in a movie, what's a stereotype but a shortcut, a way to skip over character exposition? There's only room here for a few standouts, the hot-headed commander who pushes his men because he cares so much about them, the sex-hungry ladies' man who's a little bit dim, and the burnout who's a new father and it still looking for his proper place in the world. All the other men in the unit are fairly interchangeable and don't really stand out, not even the second-in-command, who someone forgot to give any sort of personality or identity beyond that title. Compound that with the same problem as last night, which is once you put all these guys in the same uniform and they get some smoke and dirt on their faces, you can't tell any of them apart, anyway.
(To be fair, they did a hell of a job with the casting, plus hair and make-up. When they post pictures of the real firefighters during the end credits, and transition from the actors to the men they're portraying, most of them are really spot-on. Sure, doing make-up for a sci-fi or fantasy film is one thing, but replicating the look of REAL people, down to their head shapes and facial hair, that's just as much of a challenge, I think.)
The most developed character is Commander Marsh's wife - she's got a job training rescue horses, she wants to start a family, she actually says what's on her mind. It's too bad she's so tangential to the main plot, and also that her husband has only two emotions, he's either romancing her or arguing with her. There's so much missed opportunity there for character growth, but men from that generation aren't supposed to have complex emotions, it seems. He's also apparently good at "reading" fires, figuring out which way they're going to burn, or if they're going to change direction. But here again, it feels like there's something missing, in the way that a boxing film just sort of tells us "This guy is a great boxer" without being specific. HOW does this guy read the fires, does he mentally put visual cues together in a special way, did he take some course in college that gives him insight? Because just saying that it's all intuitive just doesn't cut it.
When his team is being evaluated, for example, he ignores the advice of the evaluator and disagrees with where the burn-line should be. The evaluator protests, because he's got like 40 years of experience. Marsh turns out to be correct, but then please explain why he was right and the evaluator was wrong. Marsh also doesn't have any tact, because he loses his cool when he knows he's right - I'd love to back him if he's got the winning horse, but I can't possibly know that if the film doesn't explain how he can be so right and the other guy can be so wrong.
This comes up again and again, because near the end of the film, Marsh either mis-reads a fire, or it spreads much faster than expected. Some more technical knowledge here would have been very helpful also, because what was it about this fire that made them think it would move at one speed, and then what changed to make it move at a faster speed? Or, if Marsh was so great at reading fires, why did he suddenly lose this ability and make such a bad call - or what was it about this fire that threw him off? So many questions that aren't answered here, like when the team is called on to protect a very famous tree from an approaching fire - that's all well and good, but why did they make their burnline so close to the tree, why couldn't it have been, say, 100 yards closer to the fire?
Also starring Josh Brolin (last seen in "Deadpool 2"), Miles Teller (last seen in "Rabbit Hole"), Taylor Kitsch (last seen in "Savages"), Jeff Bridges (last seen in "Kingsman: The Golden Circle"), Jennifer Connelly (last heard in "Spider-Man: Homecoming"), Andie MacDowell (last seen in "Town & Country"), Geoff Stults (last seen in "J. Edgar"), Alex Russell (last seen in "Unbroken"), Thad Luckinbill (last seen in "Just Married"), Ben Hardy (last seen in "X-Men: Apocalypse"), Scott Haze (last seen in "Midnight Special"), Jake Picking (last seen in "Patriots Day"), Scott Foxx, Dylan Kenin (last seen in "Gold"), Ryan Busch, Kenny Miller (last seen in "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot"), Ryan Jason Cook, Brandon Bunch, Matthew Van Wettering, Michael McNulty, Nicholas Jenks, Sam Quinn (last seen in "James Got a Gun"), Natalie Hall, Howard Ferguson Jr. (last seen in "Hell or High Water"), Rachel Singer (last seen in "Moonlight Mile"), Ralph Alderman, Forrest Fyre (last seen in "The Astronaut Farmer").
RATING: 6 out of 10 chainsaws
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