Director Peter Berg’s adaptation of LONE SURVIVOR has just nabbed another top name to add to the already impressive cast list in the form of Eric Bana, who last impressed audiences while wearing fatigues in Ridley Scott’s BLACKHAWK DOWN. Bana joins the ranks of Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Ben Foster, and Emile Hirsch who portray members of SEAL TEAM 10 in a mission that went awry in June 2005, killing all but one member, Marcus Luttrell (Wahlberg). Bana would be playing a SEAL lieutenant.
Berg wrote the script for the film, which he begins shooting next month in New Mexico. Although this summer’s BATTLESHIP was a dud, I don’t foresake Berg by any means. In fact, BATTLESHIP is the reason he’s even able to make LONE SURVIVOR, due to a prior deal he made with Universal to guarantee that the pic would be next on his slate if he agreed to helm BATTLESHIP. Talk about suffering for your art.
Berg has shown that he’s got the chops to handle the material with the thriller THE KINGDOM, and he certainly has the action and drama flair covered with pics like HANCOCK and FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS on his rap sheet. Personally, I love the director’s style and I couldn’t be happier to see him boarding this ship as I feel that it’s a passion project he’s deeply invested in. I expect we’ll see that passion onscreen and then some.
Here’s the synopsis:
Four US Navy SEALS departed one clear night in early July 2005 for the mountainous Afghanistan-Pakistan border for a reconnaissance mission. Their task was to document the activity of an al Qaeda leader rumored to be very close to Bin Laden with a small army in a Taliban stronghold. Five days later, only one of those Navy SEALS made it out alive.
This is the story of the only survivor of Operation Redwing, SEAL fire team leader Marcus Luttrell, and the extraordinary firefight that led to the largest loss of life in American Navy SEAL history. His squadmates fought valiantly beside him until he was the only one left alive, blasted by an RPG into a place where his pursuers could not find him. Over the next four days, terribly injured and presumed dead, Luttrell crawled for miles through the mountains and was taken in by sympathetic villagers who risked their lives to keep him safe from surrounding Taliban warriors.
LONE SURVIVOR is slated to hit theaters sometime in 2013.