Detailed Instructions: In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Q: Act of Valor 
  
 February 22, 2012 
  
 Cast & Credits Chief Dave Himself 
  
 Lt. Rorke Himself 
  
 CIA agent Roselyn Sanchez 
  
  
  
 Relativity Media presents a film directed by Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh. Written by Kurt Johnstad. Running time: 101 minutes. Rated R (for strong violence including some torture, and for language). Printer-friendly » 
  
 E-mail this to a friend » 
  
 "Act of Valor" contains hard-hitting combat footage, relentless and effective. There is a story behind the film that is no less engrossing. In an introduction, its co-directors, Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh, speak directly to the audience, describing how they got involved in a film about the Navy SEALs, how they were embedded with an actual SEAL unit — and how, when that project grew into a fiction film, they determined to use real SEALs and not professional actors. 
  
 The early version of the film, according to reporting by Rebecca Keegan of the Los Angeles Times, was variously intended as a training or recruitment film, and was made outside the usual Department of Defense guidelines for motion pictures. It now emerges as a thriller involving two (non-factual) scenarios, one about a SEALs mission to free a kidnapped CIA operative (Roselyn Sanchez), the other about a plot to smuggle terrorists into the United States through tunnels from Mexico constructed by drug cartels. 
  
  
  
 The details in both of these scenarios seem realistic — although how would I know? The co-directors and their team have produced an accomplished, riveting action movie. I am reminded of the initial impact of films like Oliver Stone's "Platoon" and Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker," which both told convincing and authentic stories. "Act of Valor," however, centers more on action and much less on the human elements involved. 
  
  
  
 The central characters are played by actual Navy SEALs, who were apparently on active duty during the filming and still are. This makes it difficult to write the ordinary kind of review, because none of their real names are revealed and indeed some of the characters seem to have no names at all. I learn from Rebecca Keegan's article that the characters named Chief Dave and Lt. Rorke are played by SEALs whose real first names are Dave and Rorke. Thanks a lot. The official cast listing is a baffling mixture of characters without names and names with "uncredited" roles, and doesn't include either Chief Dave and Lt. Rorke, so I am reduced to describing the experience and not the performances. 
  
  
  
 Much of the movie consists of pure action, punctuated by terse dialogue and few subtleties. We don't get to know the characters as individuals, they don't have personality traits, they have no back stories, they don't speak in colorful dialogue, and after the movie you'd find yourself describing events but not people. Assuming that the characters described as SEALs were being played by real SEALs, all I can say is that they were convincing and weren't asked to do any dramatic stretching they weren't capable of. 
  
  
  
 Yet the movie can be discussed on another level. In the same week I saw "Act of Valor," I also saw an extraordinary film named "Hell and Back Again." It's one of this year's Oscar nominees for best documentary feature, and will open in many markets on the same day as "Act of Valor." It is about a real man, Marine Sgt. Nathan Harris, and his real wife, Ashley. Harris led men in combat in Afghanistan. Shortly before the scheduled end of his six-month tour, a sniper's bullet entered his right buttock, shattered his hip socket and bounced back to destroy leg bones. He's quite willing to show people the entry scar and describe how he has two rods filling in for bones. 
  
  
  
 When Nathan Harris was a teenager, he says, "What I wanted to do was kill people." He enlisted in the Marines. He doesn't actually say if he has killed anyone or not, but the director, Danfung Dennis, who was embedded with Harris' Echo Company, followed him in action, and we see that he has grown into a natural leader of men. Some of the film's most involving scenes show him debating village elders (through an interpreter) about the role of America in Afghanistan; he sincerely believes he is helping to bring them freedom, and finds it hard to answer their statements that they want to be left alone by both the Americans and the Taliban. 
  
  
  
 The film follows Harris home, through an agonizing period of rehab and shows that his life will never be the same. Memories of battle haunt him, and "Hell and Back Again" intercuts actual sights and scenes from Afghanistan with scenes back home in North Carolina. He doesn't have post-traumatic stress syndrome. He dreams of returning to action, and it is hard for him to accept that it may not happen. 
  
  
  
 "Act of Valor" is gift-wrapped in patriotism. It was once intended as a recruitment film, and that's how it plays. The action scenes are harrowing but exciting. Lots of explosions and special effects. At the end, there is a full-dress military funeral, honoring three generations of warriors. The real action scenes in "Hell and Back Again" don't play like an action movie. I don't recall seeing a single Taliban fighter. One of Sgt. Harris' men is killed on the first day in the field. Harris is wounded late in his tour. Nobody saw either one of the snipers. 
  
  
  
 I have a feeling that the teenage Nathan Harris, who wanted to kill people, would have loved "Act of Valor." But "Hell and Back Again," in describing his life today, doesn't play like a recruitment film. A great deal is made by the directors McCoy and Waugh that actual live ammunition was used in the making of their film. Actual live ammunition was also used in "Hell and Back Again." If you asked Sgt. Nathan Harris what he thought about using live ammo in a Hollywood action movie, what do you suppose he would say? My best guess is, he would say they were damned fools. ||||| Honor, Courage, Commitment, Popcorn: Act of Valor Wants You 
  
 Act of Valor is, according to the opening titles, "based on real acts of valor," whatever that means. It stars real active-duty Navy SEALs, and, as the uniformed representative of the New York Coast Guard, 9th Regiment who introduced my screening explained, much of it was filmed with live-fire ammunition. 
  
 None of the above works to strengthen the muddled movie's dramatic narrative, but the film's boasted authenticity—including cameos from the latest in military hardware—and its closing dedication "to all the warriors headed downrange in the future" make clear the aim: This is the most lavish recruiting tool the armed forces have deployed to theaters in memory, besting that pre-movie commercial with the "freedom ain't so free" Kid Rock soundtrack a few years back. 
  
 The SEAL actors go uncredited, but at the center of Act of Valor are "Chief Dave" and "Lieutenant Commander Rorke," two minimally charismatic studs who compete to deliver lines in the deepest bass-baritone. (You can remember which is which only because one of them keeps a toothpick in the corner of his mouth.) 
  
 After a suicide bombing at the International School in Jakarta, Dave, Rorke, and the cursorily introduced members of their team must deploy to the likes of Costa Rica, the Sudan, and Mexico to follow the border-hopping conspiracy of a jihadist network led by a Ukrainian-born convert to Islam, Abul Shabal (Jason Cottle), arranging to purchase the latest in suicide-bomb technology from his boyhood friend, an arms dealer (Alex Veadov). 
  
 Despite that setup, the villains come across as individuals rather more compellingly than do the film's ostensible heroes, mostly mouthpieces for warrior credo recited in voiceover ("No one is more dangerous than a man who can harness his emotions," etc.). This is the prose of 300 co-screenwriter Kurt Johnstad, again showing his obvious reverence for martial values, though this time without a mythological visual analogue. The workaday soldier's dialogue heard here has, one suspects, the same relation to the real thing as the network-television mic'd talk of football players does to an actual, unobserved huddle. 
  
 You might argue that individual faces don't matter here, as individuals aren't the heroes of Act of Valor so much as is the organization, the unit. But if this is an homage to teamwork, it's no great shakes at clarifying how a team works. The combat footage, meant to show the unit working in tandem, was shot in large part with helmet-mounted cameras, a POV familiar to the film's targeted demographic from tactical first-person-shooter video games. This obscures any broader understanding of physical relationships for an "immersive" cacophony of first-person perspectives: More than any cinematic precedent, Act of Valor most closely resembles the latest upgrade of America's Army, the multiplayer recruitment-drive game launched by the U.S. military in 2002. 
  
 The film's first set piece is the best, a personnel-recovery mission that breaks away into a parallel-action chase capped by a gunboat pulling around a bend in the river, mini-gun erupting, with the fanfare of arriving cavalry. But that basic tactical clarity otherwise escapes Act of Valor: It's all about you-are-there adrenaline injections, a string of jolts to work up an appetite for the real thing. |||||
A:
Act of Valor certainly has an attention-grabbing premise—it's a fictional war movie, but it stars real Navy SEALs, was shot using live ammo, and says it is based on true events. But critics aren't exactly lining up to salute. Here's what they're saying: "The film began as a recruitment video for the Navy and more or less wound up that way," writes Kyle Smith of the New York Post. "I'm not going to say Act of Valor oversimplifies manly bravado, but Sylvester Stallone just called to say there's more to war than square-jawed warriors shooting villains in the teeth." "The villains come across as individuals rather more compellingly than do the film's ostensible heroes," writes Nick Pinkerton of the Village Voice. The SEALs don't get any individual characterization, and their dialogue "has, one suspects, the same relation to the real thing as the network-television mic'd talk of football players does to an actual, unobserved huddle." Roger Ebert couldn't help comparing the movie to the documentary Hell and Back, which features real combat scenes, and focuses on a soldier actually wounded in Afghanistan. "If you asked Sgt. Nathan Harris what he thought about using live ammo in a Hollywood movie … my best guess is, he would say they were damned fools." But Wesley Morris of the Boston Globe liked it. Sure the acting is wooden—"When these men speak, you suddenly realize how uniquely good those Ents were in Lord of the Rings"—but the action is thrilling, and, thanks to the grace of the SEALs, "there is beauty in this movie that you’d never experience in any film starring Chuck Norris or Michael Dudikoff."