Valiant One is a solid directorial debut with a talented, young cast

MPAA Rating: R
USCCB Rating, Not rated at the time of this review
Reel Rating: 3 out of 5 reels

There’s a special joy in watching the beginnings of a filmmaker’s career. Festival shorts, student films, and early experimental flicks are rarely good but give small glimmers of future potential. Valiant One is the first film of director Steve Barnett, who got his start producing edgy blockbusters (300, Piranha 3D) before focusing on smaller Christian films (A Week Away, Journey to Bethlehem).

Loosely based on a true story, it follows a small group of twentysomething soldiers who find themselves behind enemy lines. Facing obstacles they couldn’t imagine and finding undiscovered courage, they must find their way home.

Brockman (Chase Stokes) is a typical army grunt. A few years in his service, but not yet wise, he is grumpy, sarcastic, and dismissive. He wants to do the job quickly and get back to his bed. He is sent with a half dozen others to go beyond the demilitarized zone on a secret but routine mission in North Korea to fix a surveillance post. The task goes fine, but bad weather causes their helicopter to crash even further into enemy territory. Their commander, moments before dying, informs the remnants there will be no rescue. Their only option is to travel forty miles to the border and find an abandoned underground passage to freedom. He leaves the dumbfounded Brockman in charge.

Brockman and the survivors are a motley crew, like the passengers in Stagecoach, each with their own personality and strong opinions. Shelby (Lana Condor) is newer and more optimistic, putting her full faith in Brockman despite his reservations about himself. Josh (Desmin Borges), the civilian tech guy who fixed the post, is terrified. “Let’s turn ourselves in,” he pleads. “They have to follow the Geneva Convention.” Brockman wisely ignores him.

As they make their way through the Korean countryside, they face many obstacles in their Orphean journey. First, they must figure out where they are and how to get where they need to go. Second, they must avoid detection by the North Koreans. Finally, they just need to keep moving despite animals, sleep deprivation, personal squabbles, and doubt.

As the hours progress, Brockman becomes more confident and courageous. At first, he holds the map with shaking hands dumbfounded but after hitting several landmarks correctly, starts to believe in himself and his team. There’s a great phrase from Frozen 2—an odd source, I admit—that “when one cannot see the path, all one can do is the next right thing.” Solve one problem, then the next, then the next.

In an interview, Barnett told me he wanted “to avoid politics,” but there is a sense of righting past prejudices. Since the 1960s, a frequent trope in American war films is the corruption and evil of the military. Audiences are used to seeing Vietnam soldiers terrorizing the natives in Platoon, or a private security firm pillaging a planet in Avatar. Of course, war does bring out the worst in some, but I was relieved to see Valiant One focus on the better angels of our nature.

After walking all day, the team camps in an apparently abandoned barn only to be awoken by a Korean family pointing a shotgun at them. A showdown ensues, and it would have been easy to kill these farmers to avoid being discovered, but Brockman orders his men to stand down. “He could have killed us if he wanted to,” he says. “But he didn’t.” Moments later, a North Korean squad arrives and murders the mom and dad anyway, just for not killing the Americans on sight.

When the quad leaves, Brockman and his men come out of hiding and discover, hidden in the floorboards, the family’s eight-year-old daughter. Despite the objections of his men, Brockman insists they bring her along. “They will kill her,” he says, “and they helped us.” He has found not just his bravery but compassion as well. This is a truth rarely portrayed in the media today: for every lecherous guard at Abu Ghraib prison, there have been thousands of US soldiers who have saved or offered vital services to civilians, even those of our enemies.

From the perspective of a former industry man myself, I can tell this was a low-budget production. There is a small cast of largely unknown actors that wear almost the same clothes throughout the film. Nearly the entire movie is filmed in exterior locations, usually the woods. I would be surprised if the budget exceeded two million dollars. Yet the movie looks great. The acting is solid, the special effects are decent, and the story–while simple–works well. It proves that you do not need the GDP of a small country to make a good movie.

Valiant One is unlikely to get significant buzz when it premieres on today. But, like so many other small films, has a good chance of finding a second audience on streaming in the months following. That’s a wonderful thing because there’s an enormous amount of talent here. I’m excited to see what Steve Barnett has next.