MovieChat Forums > Only the Brave (2017) Discussion > This movie wore me out *spoiler alert*

This movie wore me out spoiler alert

posted 7 years ago by Jehosaphet (1063)
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Talk about moving...these guys were always moving, carrying a ton of crap on their back while shoveling, hacking, sawing at stuff, and working in temps often in excess of 100 degrees. Why couldn't they have taken off their packs while swinging those hoes, you know? Do they in real life?
Seems like this film goes out of its way to make the viewer feel not just lazy, but weak. Like less of a man, even. Personally, I couldn't find a single patchy area of mustache or beard, nope, full and lush facial hair all the way around.

On a serious note...I'd somehow never heard of this incident and since I don't have a TV, thought this movie was some kind of action-adventure firefighting flick, akin to Backdraft, but outside. Nope, every last person the film had gone out of its way to introduce and endear to the viewer ends up losing their life. Except for the one, and his surviving was nowhere near any kind of reprieve from the tragedy of it all.

I just spent the last hour or so looking up stories about this and saw an interview with Brenden, the lone survivor. At first glance he seems almost impartial, even defensive...and then you understand that the weight that this man is carrying around with him is something that's difficult to understand. To be the sole survivor out of all these people, and return to a small town full of grieving families...I imagine that even the thought of someone putting blame onto him for this is about unbearable.

Anyway, this movie is great...but if you haven't seen it and are planning on it, maybe brace yourself some. Because it seems to do well in personalizing these fine men, then demonstrating how much devastation their deaths brought to their family members, their town and to the sole survivor. Its pretty heartbreaking stuff, but it also seems like a fitting tribute that you'll feel good about having witnessed. If only to pay respects to these guys and the people that do this kind of work.

[–] maximmm (3338) 7 years ago

It's a bit weird - I didn't have any particular emotional response to their deaths. Looks like there were a few screw ups that led to their death - first a plane extinguished their burn area - then another plane didn't release the flame retardants on them -

And then one question kept bugging me - they had those covers and oxygen tanks - but it's kind of clear that they don't offer any particular protection against the heat - did the fire departments manage to develop better covers to prevent a similar problem?

Furthermore, according to wiki, some of the covers did not have any bodies under them - wtf happened? Did some of the men try to run realizing that they were about to be boiled alive?

[–] Jehosaphet (1063) 7 years ago

I read quite a bit about the incident and whatever the planes screwed up, it seems there's a lot of people who put the onus on Eric Marsh, the man played by Josh Brolin, for making the decision to lead the team away from an area they'd burned (that apparently would have been safe) and towards the town, through un-burned brush. The other side of that argument is that managing the fight of these types of fires requires a lot of fluidity and on-the-spot decision making that often involves maneuvers that aren't exactly 'by the book'.

But the covers, I guess they weren't built to withstand the kind of heat this fire was generating, so just a guess, but I imagine some of them panicked and tried making a run for it. I guess there'd been some kind of drought beforehand so that brush was like tinder...it burned quick and hot. And yeah, they've updated the protective covers since, although I didn't get the impression it was because of this incident as much as it was about keeping pace with technology, and they're still pretty limited in their application. They really were more of a last resort type deal, apparently.

A couple years back I cleared some brush from my property, started burning it in the burn barrel one afternoon and quickly realized how foolish it was to be burning anywhere near where I'd piled the brush at. Ten seconds or so after being lit, that fire got so damn hot that even jumping back 9-10 feet, my flannel shirt heated up enough to where I had to pull it away from my body. Talk about intense...I panicked and grabbed the hose...waited for some rain before giving it another go. Trying to imagine being right in the middle of that kind of heat though, my barely educated guess is that these guys didn't so much get burned alive as much as they were, for lack of better words, flash baked. That kind of heat, they didn't have time to catch on fire and burn that way, I don't think. Hopefully they didn't suffer as much anyway.