By Mac Spain
Only The Brave is directed by Joseph Kosinski with a phenomenal cast including the likes of Josh Brolin, Miles Teller, Jeff Bridges and Jennifer Connelly! It’s based on a true story all to do with the Granite Mountain Hotshots, a group of elite firefighters who risked everything fighting a wildfire northwest of Phoenix Arizona.
Lives were lost, but I don’t want to go into how many because I feel that would spoil the emotional impact of this film’s finale and I’m not just talking about an ending which leaves you with a slight sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach. The amount of restraint I exercised holding back my tears in the cinema was ridiculous, and I know I wasn’t the only one as I could hear other people sniffling all around me.
But I thought it was absolutely fantastic, what we have here is another perfect example of how to put together a movie that bases itself off of real life events. The film doesn’t operate with some ulterior motive, it simply just concerns itself with telling the story of these men in the most respectable way possible. Recently we’ve seen the likes of Thor Ragnarok and Justice League dominating the box office, but why can’t a group of non-fictional heroes receive the same amount of support and recognition? Seriously if you’re on the fence about seeing this movie, don’t be, it’s brilliant and well worth your time.
I think the reason this film is so impactful is how it divides the runtime quite nicely between showing us these men on the job and then getting more behind the scenes by showing us the drama that can occur at home. Wives having to share their husbands with the fire and fathers unable to watch their children grow up. There’s just so many compromises that come with taking on a career like this, but somebody’s got to do it otherwise earth would just become a great big smouldering ball of ash.
This brings me to yet another aspect of the film that I feel was executed in spectacular fashion and that was the depiction of the fires themselves. The fire or more general speaking Mother Nature came across like a living breathing villain in this movie. Whenever a fire broke out it looked one hundred per cent realistic, it spread fast and was completely unpredictable. You never knew from one minute to the next whether they would make it out and a lot of the time that’s something you can see coming a mile off in films. But that most definitely wasn’t the case in Only The Brave, the authenticity was through the roof and so is it’s ICM Film rating. That’s right Only The Brave gets an 8.5.
