Eric Bana in Lone Survivor (Universal Pictures)

The reason Lone Survivor likely won’t be remembered as the equal of Saving Private Ryan is that the war it depicts is unpopular and controversial, while World War II is perhaps seen as the most popular and just of recent American wars. However, if we can put ideology aside and take this film on its own merits as a sense-assaulting, almost unbearably brutal cinematic experience of warfare, Lone Survivor is every bit as affecting as the great Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg epic.

Audiences have not seen the Afghan war depicted in such uncompromising detail before in a feature film, and it is deeply chilling stuff. We see waves of Taliban forces navigating the perilous mountain terrain at unequaled speeds, brandishing old but deadly AK47s and rocket launchers, fighting outnumbered Navy SEALs scrambling for survival in an environment that offers little shelter.

The film tells the true story of four Navy SEALs (an acronym for sea, air, land) scouting a mission to assassinate Ahmad Shahd, a Taliban leader responsible for attacks killing dozens of American soldiers. The SEALs are portrayed by Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch, and Ben Foster.

Kitsch plays Mike Murphy, the highest ranking member of the outfit, and something of a legend among SEALs—early scenes set at the FOB (forward operating base) establish his physical dominance and influence among the younger SEALs, who remain behind while Murphy leads his small team in their intelligence gathering mission.

Kitsch, a longtime collaborator of the film’s director, Peter Berg, conveys a kind of effortless gravitas and minimalist nobility, showing us why the toughest men on Earth respect him so much. Berg, best known for directing the film Friday Night Lights and creating the Emmy-winning television series based on that film, has always excelled at showing camaraderie among alpha male types, and he establishes the relationships between his characters in an easy, entertaining way in a limited number of scenes before the fateful mission.

The film’s centerpiece is a relentless extended sequence where the four SEALs are blasted by Taliban soldiers, hurling down a treacherously steep, sheer rock cliff. It’s hard to overstate how impressive this sequence is. Audiences likely haven’t seen a film depict soldiers actually being shorn of large chunks of flesh in real time for so long. At the end of the sequence, they are almost unrecognizable, but they still refuse to quit. We feel, and more importantly, hear, in one of the richest audio experiences of any recent film, each broken bone as they thud into trees and boulders at high speeds. We see and feel what it’s like to have machine gun fire shred a nearby boulder, sending shards of stone flying and leaving permanent facial scars, which are shrugged off as the SEALs keep returning fire at an enemy they can barely see. It stretches viewers’ nervous systems to a breaking point, yet never excessively. It feels both impossibly dramatic and kinetically realistic.

Mark Wahlberg is probably more vulnerable in this role than he has ever been, and some of the places he goes as Marcus Luttrell are pretty heartbreaking. He can play a tough guy in his sleep, and he seems to be dialing that same old performance in early on. But this is largely a red herring, as he is physically and, more impressively, psychologically and spiritually whittled to a husk as the film progresses.

Still, Ben Foster as Matt “Axe” Axelson is the standout—more than his co-stars, he really seems to get what soldiering is deep in his bones. He inhabits the idea of soldiering in an effortlessly complete way, like what Kyle Chandler did for high school sports coaching in Berg’s TV series. He has neurotic soldier tics down impeccably, and puts up perhaps the gutsiest fight against impossible odds among the four SEALs.

Due to its subject matter, it seems important to note that this is by no means a jingoistic, rightist film. To its credit, Lone Survivor provides a more well-rounded and fair representation of the Afghani people than one might expect. We spend significant chunks of screen time with friendly villagers who hate the Taliban and just want to live in peace. Though the depiction of the nice Afghanis might be a bit tidy and one-dimensional, it’s important that it was included.

One of the things cinema does best is recreating experiences of the sensory world, and the action scenes in this movie do that as well as any modern war film has. See it with a sound system that will rattle your skull.