Kajaki

Kajaki is an extraordinary film for two reasons: Firstly because there is twenty minutes in the middle that are the most tense I've ever seen in a movie, both L and I were sitting up on the sofa gasping in horror. Secondly because, as one of the men depicted puts it in an interview: this is not based on real events, it is real events, everything is exactly as it happened.

Certainly it's only a voice-over away from being a really good docu-drama rather than a really good film. I don't recall it having any soundtrack and much of the dialogue felt unusually accurate. I'm thinking of both the jargon filled back and forth before firing a mortar round and the clearly very procedural conversations around treating injuries. These would surely be rejected by a normal script editor as too long-winded in the first case and too repetitious in the second. Here they help give the weight of realism to the movie which is what makes it work so well.

There are two things, and another third thing, I think, that would have been done differently in a based on real events movie:

1. You would have whittled down the characters. It is always a problem in soldier movies to introduce the characters well enough for the viewer to distinguish one from the other by the time the action starts; they all have the same haircut and wear the same clothes. Dog Soldiers does this very well. Aliens exceptionally well. In Kajaki there are simply too many and, faithfully depicting the boredom of life at the damn, not enough for them to do.

It makes up for this with some good naturalistic acting and a very good ear for squaddy dialogue, I had little idea who most of them were but they felt so real I still cared about them.

2. You would pace the action differently. The first mine goes off about 45 minutes in I think, which is as much a script decision here as it would be in any other film, but after that they come pretty regularly (once every ten minutes or so) until they don't anymore. This is not what you'd chose. You'd either hammer them at the audience one after the other with no let up and then make it a film about trying to save the lives of the injured for the last half hour, or you'd let them build, with a long break after the first one so that the audience felt safe again, and the ratchet them up, each pause being smaller than the last, so the action builds toward the climax.

The risk in exploding the mines at regular intervals is that the audience comes to expect it, feels safe, and then fails to take it seriously. Kajaki is focused on the reaction though, how the men handle each new blast and each new set of injuries. Consequently there is roughly the same amount of movie after each mine. It gets away with it, again, because it feels so real, and also because it's so intense. The performances and the effects work are the key. The injuries look all too horribly real and the men all too close to cracking under the pressure. This is a big achievement for what was a pretty low budget movie.

3. Finally, and this is where it would become another film entirely, you'd have to up the ante somehow at the end. They'd have to make some superhuman effort to carry the wounded out on foot, or there would have to be a race against time to fetch more medical supplies, or, most obviously and most destructively, the Taliban would attack. Something silly.

If Kajaki has a weak point it is the final fifteen minutes which is, fundamentally, just some blokes sitting in the dirt waiting to be rescued. Tension only exists because one of them might die, but there is no desperate CPR, no E.R.-style scenery chewing and rending of garments at the bedside. We get a small amount of shouting and a handful of tell my kids I love them, but, true to the characters, that is all pretty low key.

Kajaki was good enough that I didn't care though, I was wholly invested in the characters by that point and, rather than wondering why the film lost pace, I was just desperate that they should get out of there without treading on another mine.

It took risks this movie, and they paid off.