Kajaki

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. (01/12/2015)

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. (10/07/2015)

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%) (03/10/2022)