“Mine,” directed by Fabio Guaglione & Fabio Resinaro and starring Armie Hammer (Mike), Tom Cullen (Tommy), Clint Dyer (Berber), Annabelle Wallis (Jenny), Juliet Aubrey (Mike’s mother) & Geoff Bell (Mike’s father).

Rotten Tomatoes, with which I generally disagree, offers no exception regarding this Netflix movie on streaming, “Mine.” It gives the film one star. I give the film five + stars. I include this note in my review to highlight the fact that I believe this film is easy to misunderstand and misinterpret.

The most important thing to understand about this movie is that it is an allegory, rather than a story to be taken too literally, though the existential dilemma suffered through most of the story by the main character, Mike, U.S. Marine and trained expert sniper/assassin, is explicitly simple and visceral: a man who has stepped on a land mine, the type that explodes should he lift his foot off the trigger mechanism. There is only so much I wish to say about the actual movie plot, place and characters. Suffice to say here that the story all takes place in the burning and freezing desert, amidst sandstorms, all in enemy territory. Yet the real story is the internal struggle of Mike. Even in my second viewing of the film, knowing what is going to happen, Armie Hammer playing the trapped marine, gives such an intensely taut and riveting performance. I felt myself, as I watched it once again, literally gripping the chair in which I sat.

During my second viewing, I watched for and found many of the foreshadowings, clues and hints given all along this narrative story line, disclosing what the film is really about, and belied by the glaring simplicity of Mike’s dilemma. I would suggest you take note, as you watch this intriguing film, of such pregnant lines as, “Get yourself out of this spiritual crisis;” “You can’t just keep this inside;” “The dunes keep shifting their position;” “Don’t get paranoid. There are only two options;” and “Don’t let an old sign mess with your head.” Even the toy soldiers (many of us have looked at or played with as children) proclaim an aspect of the theme that runs through narrative. You might note and reflect upon the inanimate/dead feet that stand, undistinguished from the ground upon which they stand that props them to stand where placed.

This movie asks you to question yourself; to question whether or not, in your own life, you are even asking the right question. By having the viewer completely identify with the existential horror of Mike’s stark predicament, you see how he was asking the wrong question about whether the mine was active or an old dud. For me, the film is an metaphor, like Plato’s allegory of the prisoners in the cave, that was profoundly compelling me to look at myself and see my own “stuckness,” my own anxious ambivalence about decisions I am confronted by, the risk of taking a step, as well as the risk of not taking a step for fear of the greatness of the risk, of the step, and the dire or joyful consequences of such movement forward.

You know as you watch this film, there is no guarantee of a good outcome. Every decision and moment in life involves such momentous and, possibly, even life altering consequences. But this movie has you feel this truth right in your gut, dead center at the core of your own life. This film is superbly entertaining, fiercely tense and fraught with tension, and executed like a razor across the edge of your own resistance to moving on, to letting go and to taking a chance on the unknown no matter what the result may be; being blown up and into smithereens, blown away, or catapulted into being truly alive!

Photo of Norman Babbitt by Lucy Mitchell

Norman Babbitt