Guy Ritchie's The Covenant and why Hollywood is afraid of the war in Afghanistan (2024)

Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, the new action-thriller about an army sergeant who returns to Afghanistan is the latest tentative US attempt to explore the conflict, writes Caryn James.

Guy Ritchie's The Covenant is an intense action movie, full of gunfire and explosions that make you feel caught in the midst of danger. And like so many war films it relies on a slender plot about heroic choices. Jake Gyllenhaal plays John Kinley, a US army sergeant in Afghanistan in 2018, whose life is saved by his Afghan interpreter, Ahmed (Dar Salim). In the kind of single-handed exploit that only happens in movies, after Kinley returns home and learns that Ahmed and his family are being hunted by the Taliban for having helped the Americans, he returns to Afghanistan to try to save him. So far, just another commercial adventure.

But the film's real-world resonance, shallow but there, points toward a burgeoning trend on screen, for works centring on the 20-year-long US war in Afghanistan, which ended when their military left in 2021. It took just a few years after the US withdrew from Vietnam for some great films to arrive, including Apocalypse Now (1979) and The Deer Hunter (1978). The Covenant and other tentative responses suggest that while filmmakers are now setting their stories in Afghanistan, coming to grips with that conflict on screen may take a lot longer. The Hollywood landscape is more cautious than ever today, and the US too politically divided for movies to risk alienating half the audience. (A recent Pew Research Center poll revealed that US opinions about Afghanistan are split along party lines.)

Although the war in Afghanistan now stands as the longest in US history, it has rarely been top of mind in public awareness. The US military entered Afghanistan in 2001 in the wake of 9/11, to prevent attacks that might come from terrorists based there, but the war was quickly overshadowed by other global conflicts, first in Iraq and more recently Ukraine. The Covenant is especially timely now, though. Two weeks ago the Biden administration released a report about the US troop withdrawal and the chaotic evacuation as thousands of Afghans crowded Kabul airport trying to leave. The Taliban took control of the country within weeks of US and UK troops exiting, restricting human rights, especially for women and creating a worldwide crisis of Afghan refugees.

Guy Ritchie's The Covenant (that's the full, clumsy title, which at least distinguishes it from several other movies called The Covenant) lands in that context, but it is not the first or only Hollywood treatment of the conflict, and in particular, of the relationship between US soldiers and their Afghan guides. In fact, there is another one opening next month: Kandahar (released in the US on 26 May) is a Gerard Butler action movie about a CIA operative trapped in a dangerous part of Afghanistan with his interpreter. The trailer shows Butler saying "Nobody's coming to save us", a cue for the two of them to battle the enemies and save each other.

There have been earlier, tone-deaf attempts as well. The United States of Al (2021-22) was a bland CBS network buddy comedy about an Afghan guide who lives in the US with the Marine he helped and the Marine's family. Tina Fey plays a journalist in Kabul in the 2016 comedy-infused drama Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, a movie so culturally insensitive that it cast the American Christopher Abbott as her Afghan interpreter. The Covenant, despite its melodramatic plot and one-dimensional characters, captures more reality than that.

In his professional journey as a filmmaker, Ritchie has moved from his gritty early British gangster films all the way to Disney's Aladdin, and The Covenant aims to be another mainstream hit. The press notes for the film say that Ritchie had long wanted to make a war movie. "I'd heard various anecdotes about Afghanistan that all sounded in equal measure horrifying and inspiring," he says. "The story of one man's selflessness for another was what I found inspiring about the premise." Though that's a statement that could apply to almost any war film.

The truth behind the fictions

But The Covenant is also built on some verifiable facts and sentiments, adding ballast to its explosive surface. Text at the end of the film says that 300 Afghans have been killed and thousands are in hiding from the Taliban for having cooperated with the US. Annie Pforzheimer, a former US diplomat who was Deputy Chief of Mission in Kabul in 2017-18, says the text rings true. "That number obviously will be out of date almost immediately, but there are many well-documented cases that the UN and independent human rights observers have been reporting," she tells BBC Culture.

And the bond between Kinley and Ahmed echoes a strong connection Pforzheimer has observed first-hand. "Soldiers who served and diplomats who served closely for 20 years with Afghan interpreters, police, military, and officials feel a deep sense of loyalty to them," she says, adding that films like The Covenant "reflect the real feeling of [their] helplessness and a little bit of wish fulfilment."

The Covenant also has an unexpected critical edge in its emphasis on how US Visas promised to Ahmed and his family are tangled in so much red tape that the Taliban would likely find him before he could leave the country. Furious, Kinley yells at an army officer: "The deal was that we offered his family sanctuary. Then we tied a noose around his neck and kicked the stool out from under him." Putting politics and florid dialogue aside, his frustration reflects the fact that veterans' groups and other non-profits are calling attention to a backlog of Special Immigration Visas to the US, the kind promised to Afghan guides.

With lower budgets and few commercial expectations, documentaries can afford to be more pointed in their criticism of the US's approach to Afghanistan. Matthew Heineman's Retrograde, shortlisted for the best documentary Oscar, embeds a camera crew with US Special Forces, aka Green Berets, just before the US withdrawal and reveals the bond between US soldiers and their Afghan counterparts. "We appreciate you guys," a US officer, unhappy with the decision to leave so abruptly, says in a bleak tone to the Afghans.

The complicated mechanics and budgets for major features help explain the time lag between the end of any war and great films about it. But public attitudes are just as important. The bedrock assumption that World War Two was a noble war has guided every film about it, from the 1940s through to Saving Private Ryan (1998) and beyond. By the time the Vietnam War ended in 1975, opinions were beginning to coalesce around the idea that US involvement was a mistake, clearing the way for films like Platoon (1986).

Keeping things apolitical

But most films about battles in Iraq and Afghanistan are determinedly apolitical, praising the heroism of the soldiers as a way of sidestepping deeper issues about the divisive wars themselves. Another Gyllenhaal movie, Jarhead (2005), takes place in the early 1990s during the Gulf War, and a Marine casually gets the film out from under any question about that conflict by imploring his comrades to forget "politics, all right? We're here", adding that "all the rest" doesn't matter.

The Outpost (2020), about a major battle in Afghanistan, does something similar when a soldier says, "Freedom ain't free," the only vaguely politically-tinged comment in the entire film, which focuses on the bravery of the soldiers and the horrors of the violence.

The film historian and critic David Thomson, whose book The Fatal Alliance: A Century of War on Film, will be published in November, says violence is the attraction of war movies. He tells BBC Culture: "There's really no such thing as an anti-war film, because whatever the intention the filmmakers had, the mechanism of the medium makes the act of war, the shooting, the killing, enticing and alluring."

And even the best Hollywood war movies assume a Western point of view. Meanwhile films from Afghanistan exist, but are often overlooked. Sahraa Karimi's 2019 feature, Hava, Maryam, Ayesha, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, is a beautifully observed, light-handed yet trenchant story about three pregnant Afghan women from different classes. Karimi, one of the most prominent filmmakers recently working in Afghanistan, hurriedly left Kabul in 2021 when the Taliban took over and now considers herself an exile, living in New York. She is planning to shoot a film based on her escape, called Flight from Kabul, and tells BBC Culture, "The story happens two months before the fall of Kabul. I want to show the world that we had our lives, our issues, we had our dreams, and though the security situation wasn't very good, still every day we woke up and started a new day, with new hope."

She says of mainstream US films about her country, "Afghanistan, for famous directors with Hollywood budgets, is a story from behind the mountain, which is exotic, interesting, but it is not authentic." She adds: "It is a very Western perspective about what was going on in Afghanistan, where somebody is going to save the interpreter or something. There are lots of things Afghan people and their stories can share with the world, without going into this victim and saviour formula."

Lack of distribution for modest foreign-language films can make them seem almost invisible, though. Karimi's films, including her documentary Afghan Women Behind the Wheel (2009) are not available to stream. Neither is the highly regarded A Letter to the President (2003) by another Afghan woman director, Roya Sadat. They are squeezed out by movies with explosions and brave male soldiers, with their long history of commercial success.

One thing for sure is that there will be more mainstream films about Afghanistan on their way. Thomson calls the video from Kabul airport a moment of "incredible cinematic imagery, people falling off planes." Already used in documentaries, those images are ready-made for the next – let's hope for deeper – generation of war movies.

Guys Ritchie's The Covenant is out in US cinemas now

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