VALIANT ONE -- Flat, Thin Military Thriller Reveals Deeply Ingrained Americentric Jingoism

Review by Daniel Lima

It can be hard to properly judge art that runs counter to your political convictions. To what extent does an objectionable worldview affect a work’s artistic merit? Can a heinous sociopolitical message truly be separated from aesthetic values? Valiant One slices through this Gordian knot with ease, tying its particular brand of establishment-friendly jingoism directly to its own emotional core to the point that it’s impossible to appreciate the film at all without casting judgment on its simple-minded politics. Also, it’s really bad.

A small team of U.S. Army soldiers stationed in South Korea go on a routine mission to repair some surveillance tech. After a terrible storm leads to a helicopter crash, only a handful of grunts and a civilian defense contractor are left. They realize that they have landed on the other side of the Korean DMZ, well into North Korean territory. The team must band together in order to escape this hellish land full of people who would murder and rape them with no hesitation.

Writer-director-producer Steve Barnett insists that he set out to make an apolitical film, focusing not on articulating a coherent message, but on telling a story about personal heroism and rising up to meet a great challenge. Like all “apolitical” art, however, the film betrays certain ideological predilections, so deeply entrenched in the minds of Barnett and Americans in general that they are simply accepted. It presumes that: America has a right to maintain a military presence on the Korean peninsula; American interests are altruistic; the North Korean government is cruel and hostile to any sort of diplomacy; the North Korean people would welcome an American intrusion into their home; any form of violence that American military personnel engage in is justified.

Suffice it to say, I find all of these presumptions suspect, ranging from disingenuous to ignorant to despicable. Undoubtedly, most Americans would object to at least one of these, in spite of oft-recited truisms about the righteousness of the American military and the evils of North Korea. Yet Valiant One necessitates broad acceptance of these ideas in order to function as a story.

If you don’t believe that the North Korean military would brutalize any American they come across, the premise seems thin. If you don’t think Americans should be installing surveillance equipment on the Korean border, it gets harder to root for these characters. And if you don’t like the idea of armed soldiers bursting into homes of foreign civilians in countries they aren’t supposed to be in the first place — or better still, killing foreign soldiers before even attempting to communicate with them — it becomes impossible not to see these “heroes” as villains.

Of course, it’s possible for a film with objectionable politics to still be engaging, stimulating, entertaining. Valiant One is none of those things. The main ensemble is given only the barest amount of definition, mostly relying on archetypes: the dutiful grunt, the reluctant hero, the sniveling civilian. Normally, a narrative like this would see this team fleshed out through the trials that they undergo, pitting them against obstacles that force reveal parts of themselves that might never otherwise see the light of day. Instead, most of the film is just wandering through the woods, pitched and repetitive arguments, and inert gunfights, none of which spurns any interesting character development beyond “they get tougher”. It’s surprising that even at a scant eighty minutes, so much of this movie is just dead air.

An interesting note is that the film begins with a title card claiming to be inspired by true events. Of course, this is being generous, as by Barnett’s own admission the genesis of the story was the realization that American soldiers are stationed near the 38th parallel (in the past, downed American servicemen have been released after a period of detention). That little fib is par the course in works like this, however, and unremarkable on its own.

If one is willing to engage in this bit of fiction, however, why stop there? Why not engineer a scenario where these soldiers are captured and have to break free before execution? Why not see them run into a North Korean family that is not enamored with them, forcing the squad to make tough choices about what they’re willing to do to hide their incursion? Why not name any of the North Koreans pursuing them, give them characterizations and treat them as something more than a faceless Other? Why not make Valiant One a more interesting movie?
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Valiant One lands in theaters January 31.

Rating: 1.5/5