Colombia: The Squad (2011)
Twenty minutes into The Squad I found myself thinking this seems very familiar.
There’s an unusual phenomenon in which very similar films are often made at the same time. This is sometimes due to smaller studios cashing in on a big studio film (The Asylum have turned this into an art form – although sadly their films have yet to qualify as such themselves) and sometimes it’s simply synchronicity. 1989 was the year of underwater monsters (The Abyss, DeepStar Six, Lords of the Deep, The Evil Below) while 2000 gave us Red Planet, Mission to Mars and Blood Red Planet).
If you liked The Keep and wanted to see more films about a platoon of soldiers discovering something evil in an ancient place (or trench or bunker) you had a very long wait for more, but then the first decade of this century left you spoiled; Deathwatch, Dead Birds, R-Point, World War Dead, War of the Dead, Red Sands, The Outpost, The Bunker, The Devil’s Rock, The Guard Post all appeared within a few years.
My problem with The Squad was that I couldn’t tell whether it was familiar because it was simply similar to all the others or if I’d seen it and completely forgotten it because it was so similar to all the others.
The opening doesn’t help; a squad is despatched to a distant outpost because contact has been lost. I’ve seen horror films before. Contact is always being lost with distant outposts, and it’s never because they’re so busy partying they don’t want to be disturbed; it’s because something bad has happened (and because a distant outpost is cheaper to depict than a base near a busy city).
The soldiers (none of whom are ever properly introduced, all of whom are dressed identically and sport buzz cuts) are joined by a new, inexperienced captain (because when you’re sending a squad into an unknown and potentially deadly situation it’s always a good idea to give a neophyte a steep learning curve and never results in bad things happening) and a man with a secret (although in this one his secret is revealed within five minutes of their arrival at the base and his relevance is lost. Other than being The Outsider that they can all mistrust).
So far, none of this sounds particularly notable, not even to me and I only watched the film last night. It sounds very, very generic. And that’s because it is very, very generic.
The squad finds a woman who has been bricked up behind a wall. There’s no trace of the missing platoon they came to find, only some of their notes. Insurgents are blamed for all of this, despite no evidence of insurgents being around (this isn’t sharp political commentary – it’s lazy writing). The notes reveal that the woman was bricked up deliberately because she’s evil. (It’s never explained how she’s evil, just that she is. I don’t think she’s given a single line, but then if I’d just been bricked up and left to die I don’t think I’d be particularly communicative either.)
The woman escapes as soon as she can, which gives paranoia time to run rampant and for the squad to turn on each other. Like you do.
All of this would be highly atmospheric and disturbing if a) we’d never seen anything like it before, b) we cared about any of the characters, c) explanations were given, d) anything scary actually happened, e) we gave a shit.
But we don’t. We don’t care about the woman, because we don’t know her. We don’t care about the men because they don’t have characters. We don’t care about their paranoia because it makes no sense (if they fall apart over something as simple as this, it’s a miracle they made it through basic training). We’re not scared.
Atmospheric shots of the dark and fog are all well and good, but there needs to be something to be scared of within the dark and fog, or at least the suggestion of it. The only element here that’s doing any decent work is the sound design, and frankly if you’re stopping to admire the sound design there’s clearly something wrong with everything else. You’re not supposed to notice sound design. It’s supposed to work, not just have you going ooh, this sounds good. If only it looked as good as it sounds.
There’s nothing actually wrong with the direction, just as there’s nothing wrong with the performances or the lighting or the editing. They’re perfectly serviceable. Perfectly serviceable isn’t enough to sustain a film that’s plotless, though. And the writing here is bland to an unacceptable degree. Paranoia feeds on ambiguity, but there’s simply no reason for it here. It’s not even clear why battle-hardened soldiers are scared; nothing is happening, and there’s not enough of that nothing to scare soldiers. Had one of them been hallucinating ghosts that at least would serve to unnerve the others, but no. Everyone’s jumpy because the script says so. (A belated attempt is made to suggest it’s as a result of trauma due to atrocities they’ve carried out, but that’s so shamefully revealed - a narrative twist that neither adds to the narrative nor actually features a twist - that it doesn’t even begin to explain what we’ve just seen.)
There’s one sequence which is unintentionally hilarious (a leg is amputated, and the film briefly jumps into grand guignol, but it doesn’t work because it’s trying so hard to shock that it instead has the opposite effect) and then the film kind of fizzles out as everyone turns on one another. This is also presumably what happened to the previous group (the ones they lost contact with). Although why they did it, or what happened to their bodies isn’t explained, because logic and real-world consequences aren’t the focus of the script. Nothing is the focus of the script; it’s a horror film without horror. A thriller without thrills.
It turns out that I had indeed seen The Squad before, and I forgot simply because it’s so unmemorable. I fully intend to remember it this time, though, because I have no bloody intention of watching it a third time.
Disc: Blu-ray (Region A, Canada)
Source: eBay
Availability: Out of print but still widely available; the USA also had a release, the UK had a DVD, Germany had both BD and DVD releases, Spain, France and Region 4 were DVD only.