Kajaki

Blackadder in no man's land: "Where the hell are we?" George peers at the map: "Well, it's hard to say. We've crawled to a place marked with little mushrooms..." The British army has always had a knack for mines, but jokes aside, the explosive remnants left by the Soviets in the dry riverbed lead to a rapid depletion of tourniquets and morphine. Aware of the chaos of war, which so often mocks human fate and quotes Murphy's Law, I tuned into the absurd reality of the situation. Shock, panic, pain, anger, determination, and a half-priced pedicure—tall grass tickling your balls—and if we don’t get out of here, I’ll kick all your asses. Two things were predictable: that the graphics in the end credits would take it to the level of Lone Survivor, and that many of the local reviewers who served as engineers would raise an eyebrow. (2024-04-17)

I don’t think I’ve seen an operation more fucked up than the one at the Kajaki Dam in Afghanistan. And it gets even worse when you realize that it actually was no operation at all. A bunch of bored soldiers simply walked into a fuck-up as big as a nuclear powerplant. Anyways, I tip my hat off to the great cinematography. I was as tense as a bowstring and there were barely any Arabs in the movie… As I said, I haven’t seen an operation this botched and the English sure had the balls to actually make this movie, presenting all the facts. For instance, the stupidity that seemed to be jumping from guy to guy among those bonehead soldiers. (2015-11-30)

A barely believable tragicomic series of events that lead to the destruction of a military unit by several forgotten Soviet mines on a few square meters in a valley in the middle of nowhere. You hardly come up with something so absurd. After all, it is said to stick to the facts faithfully. On top of that, they managed to perfectly capture the psycho-tense atmosphere of a ridiculous, but hopeless situation; in the best moments, when the true personality (in fact even the entrails) of the individual characters is fully revealed, the Sorcerer (1977) will come to your mind. The whole movie then progresses after the first helicopter attempts to land around two thirds of the footage. After this climax that comes too early, the movie only gets worse and becomes dull and the increasingly naturalistic anti-war movie begins to turn into to a movie celebrating all this. (2015-07-10)

An intense, gritty and bleak war film about a group of soldiers who get trapped in a mined ravine. It's nerve-wracking as fuck, the gang is likeable and once the mines start exploding (and there are some!) I was strapped into my seat as long as I could. Take away the last 20 minutes, where the film is already dragging moderately, and I would have been even more satisfied. (2023-04-21)

Kajaki is so realistic and raw that the sight of all the injuries made me nauseous. That's mainly why I never want to see this movie again, even though it's not bad at all. However, the plot drags on too much with all the waiting in the minefield for rescue, so I rate it only with three stars. (65%) (2022-10-02)