My Review of "Outside the Wire"

Outside the Wire is one of Netflix's newest movies in 2021. This is from the company's promise that they will have a new movie for each week of 2021. There's some nice ideas in this movie but ultimately it feels more like I'm watching a video game's cutscenes all woven together.

The movie starts off with a war scene. Some American soldiers are caught by some foreign group. I don't know if I can call them foreign when the American's are fighting on their soil. Two men are caught in gun fire and a suspicious van drives up to the area.

We then get introduced to the main character, Harp. He's a drone pilot all the way back in the US. He's at an American military base flying the drone at the war scene. He notices the van and tells his superior officers that there is definitely some rockets or some sort of weapon in the van. The superior officers tell him to hold on the attack because there are two wounded soldiers in the way.

Harp is the kind of guy that works off his own instinct despite orders from authorities. He truly believed that the American troops were in a dire situation so he decided to fire anyways. His choice resulted in the deaths of the two soldiers that were caught in gun fire. The rest of the troops were saved though. Unapologetic Harp stands by his decision.

Due to his actions he's placed in a different company out in Europe behind enemy lines. He's assigned to a Captain Leo. When he meets the troops there he's obviously vilified for what he's done. The biggest shock though is that Captain Leo isn't exactly human. He's this robot type thing. A new age in super soldiers I guess. It's crazy because he looks and acts just like a real human being.

Harp isn't sure what his assignment is but to help Captain Leo. That's where the movie really starts. They have a bunch of encounters with different enemies and I guess there's this weighing of morality in each encounter. The whole movie is about discussing the decisions of what is right and what's wrong. Do the lives of the few outweigh the lives of the many or is it vice versa? Everything has some sort of circumstance that we don't really look at.

As a drone pilot in the beginning Harp doesn't really understand this mode of thought because he's emotionless to what's going on at the ground level. He doesn't see the carnage and destruction that he may cause as a result of his decisions. In a way this message could be translated to different things in life. For example, they could have done this as a movie about a corporation not realizing the lives of the few in their company are greatly influenced when they decide to save millions of dollars for all of their shareholders. That wouldn't be as interesting of a film because there's less action though.

This movie does have some pretty good action. I guess it's pretty futuristic because they've got drone attacks and robots to fight alongside the soldiers on the ground. For the most part I was pretty impressed with the special effects that they pulled off in this film. They seemed pretty high caliber.

Overall, I was able to enjoy this movie but it felt more like a video game than a fully fleshed out movie. They had objectives and then they would go onto a new level of things to do. It reminded me of the game Metal Gear Solid in a way with the cinematography. The movie is still fun but I don't know if I could recommend it to people. I have to give this movie a 5 out of 10. It was actually quite boring at times so I don't really think you'll like it unless you don't mind the stories they have in video games.