- After a failed assassination attempt, a United States Marine finds himself stranded in the desert. Exposed to the elements, he must survive the dangers of the desert and battle the psychological and physical tolls of the treacherous conditions.
- In the middle of the desert, an area filled with 33 million blast mines scattered everywhere, marine sniper Sergeant Mike Stevens is on a mission to locate and neutralize the leader of a terrorist cell. After three months and six days in the desert, one single moment of hesitation is enough to blow the entire mission, and now Sergeant Stevens is stranded in a hostile guerrilla territory all alone, and to make matters worse, with his left foot on an active mine. Against the harsh environment, without water, the sergeant must stay glued to the spot and use his Marine training, his resourcefulness and his perseverance for the next 52 hours until a convoy arrives in his area. Between the scalding heat of the day and the freezing cold of the night, if Sergeant Stevens wants to survive, he must fight not only the mighty forces of nature but also the greatest adversary of them all: himself.—Nick Riganas
- In intermittent cuts between scenes, we see a hardened marine in camouflage saying goodbye to a young woman at the airport and traveling in a helicopter to his next mission. In the next scene, Mike (Armie Hammer) the marine and his spotter Tommy (Tom Cullen) are set up on a cliff overlooking a desert. Tommy lightheartedly chats away as Mike stays fully alert and serious when they see multiple people on foot on one side and multiple armed vehicles on the other approaching. The descriptions provided for the target do not fully match what they are seeing, which causes Mike to hesitate. As Tommy and the voice over the radio try to get Mike to make the hit, he realizes that the meeting is a wedding, and the target might be the groom's father. Further complicating the matter, the target is now standing behind the groom, and is not known to have a son, but Mike is ordered to take out the groom to get to the target. Mike drops the mission, lying they've lost him, but then they are spotted by the armed lookouts protecting the ceremony.
They manage to escape through a clever distraction Mike creates, and request evacuation. They are told they need to cross the desert in front of them to get to a village where they can be picked up. It is going to take them four hours against armed hostiles and the elements, so they get going. We find that Tommy has a wife and a son back home, and Mike has Jenny (Annabelle Wallis), his girlfriend. It is further revealed that Mike is a man of few words, and Tommy is a chatterbox. Tommy is aware that something is eating Mike on the inside, but Mike doesn't talk about it. The problem seems to be that Mike is having difficulty taking the big step of proposing to his girlfriend, which Tommy teases him about.
After they wait out a sandstorm in the middle of the desert, a warning sign comes whirling out of the wind and lands right in front of Mike's feet. While Mike takes it seriously, reciting how many mines are buried in these lands, Tommy assures him it's just a Berber trick to keep enemies away and that it just means they're close to their destination. He starts walking on uninhibitedly, chatting away about how thirsty he is and making jokes. Mike gives him some of his water, for which Tommy is very grateful. Mike is still proceeding cautiously, his mind preoccupied with the warning sign they saw. Tommy, rejuvenated with the water he's just drunk, is walking backwards carelessly a few yards in front of him, goofing on about how Mike is an overthinker. When he stops walking for a second trying to remember something, a "click" is heard, but before Mike can warn Tommy, he resumes moving and the mine he'd stepped on explodes. As he goes temporarily deaf, Mike takes a step towards Tommy, and hears another "click" where his foot just landed. He freezes in shock.
The sand from the blast starts to clear out and a ringing sound sets in their ears. We see that Tommy has survived the explosion, but lost both his legs below the knees. Oblivious to everything, he's screaming for Mike. Mike, unable to move himself, struggles to calm Tommy down. Tommy's panic elevates another notch when he sees the state of his legs, and he starts to scream even louder. When nothing seems to work, Mike brings up Tommy's son, which cuts through his panic so that he's able to inject himself with the morphine marines carry in their front pocket. In his agony, though, Tommy reaches for the second tube of morphine, and despite Mike's continuous warnings to stop, he injects himself a second time. Overcome with emotions and high on an overdose of morphine, Tommy shoots himself in the head while Mike watches helplessly.
The remainder of the movie comprises Mike trying to survive the desert unable to move. The first thing he realizes is that the radio is still next to Tommy, who's several yards away. He gets creative with what he has on his person and gets the radio, only to realize that the battery is dead, and the spare is on Tommy's body. Then, another sandstorm hits full force. He manages to wait it out without moving from his spot. Once it's over, the first thing he realizes is that the storm has brought Tommy's body (and therefore the spare battery) right next to him, yet the radio has drifted too far from his reach. Within the next few hours, a seemingly half-witted Berber (Clint Dyer) comes shuffling along from over the hill Mike's facing. Completely ignoring the lethal danger Mike is in, he makes fun of him for not moving on and goes on his way, without even giving him water, let alone his radio. Later, though, a little girl (Inés Píñar Mille) shows up carrying Mike's flask, which the Berber had taken. She hands it to Mike, and to his relief, it's full with water. Although the girl never speaks, using her toy soldiers, she seemingly tells Mike that he has to step off the mine and move on. In his desperation to get to the radio, Mike gets too loud and excited, scaring the girl away. Later, the Berber comes back and frustrates him some more. He keeps going on about how Mike should move on, unaffected by his pleas for him to get him the radio. At last, though, he does bring it over, warning Mike that he won't be able to hear any music where he is.
At last, Mike is able to contact his commanding officer. He is told that the closest time they can pick him up through land is in 52 hours. The major tells him he should try digging a ditch and jumping in it, which would "only" result in a non-life-threatening limb loss. Mike decides to tough it out and wait for rescue, setting a countdown on his watch. As he has nothing else to do but wait, he gets flashbacks from his past, of events and people that have haunted him all his life. We find that he suffered a lot in the hands of his father (Geoff Bell) as a child, both physically and mentally, and was a constant witness to domestic violence in his own home. He thinks himself a coward for becoming a marine and leaving his mom (Juliet Aubrey) in the hands of an abusive husband only to return when she was terminally ill. He also doesn't think himself worthy of Jenny, which seems to be the reason behind his hesitation to propose. The way he sees it, he has only brought problems to the relationship while Jenny was nothing but patient, constructive, and loving. For one reason or another, all his flashbacks end with him on one knee, just like he is now, with the sound of a "click".
As he gets more and more tired, sleep-deprived, and beaten down by the elements, he starts hallucinating. Reality blends into his hallucinations, and he physically throws punches, shouts, talks, yells in the middle of the desert. He survives two nights warding off attacks from feral dogs. After the first night, the Berber stops by, following a zigzag pattern like before to avoid the mines, and tells Mike he's lucky for surviving as long as he has. Mike's out of patience with him, but the Berber seems to get less half-witted as he questions Mike's life choices, constantly pushing him to stop being scared and move on. He reveals to Mike that he once stepped on a mine himself, and lost one of his legs. He shows him his wooden leg. He says he vainly thought his life was over when it happened as no woman in her right mind would look at a one-legged man twice, except he met his wife on that very hospital stay from losing his leg. He's been blessed with a happy marriage and beautiful children since then, and none of it would have happened had he remained fixed on the mine like Mike is now.
On the second night fighting off the dogs, Mike sustains bite wounds. Mixed with his thirst and fatigue, he almost collapses the next morning, though the Berber catches him seemingly arriving out of nowhere, and nurses his wounds. Once again fed up with the Berber's infinite optimism, Mike accuses him of not really caring for what happens to him because if he did, he'd bring help as he clearly knows how to avoid the mines. He says he bets the Berber's daughter brought Mike the water that first day without the Berber knowing. The Berber pauses for a moment. We learn that he doesn't actually know where the mines are -he's just taking his chances going in zigzags- and that it was him, the Berber himself, that brought Mike the water. He tells Mike that he no longer has a daughter; she died in a mine explosion during one of their father-daughter excursions to dig out mines and replace them with tin cans. Mike listens, dumbfounded. The Berber tells him he's happy his daughter came to meet Mike, but he really needs to move on now. Then, he leaves.
Mike all but steps off the mine when the major tells him on the radio that his rescue have been delayed by several hours. His hallucinations get even more realistic and scary, but we find out that before she passed away, her mother lovingly gave him her blessing to move on with his life, and that his girlfriend, even after all he's done to sabotage their relationship, sent him off to this mission with love, a smile, and a promise to wait for him. As he disconnects from reality completely, his father confronts Mike in the desert. First, he mocks and challenges him, but he gets emotional after a while, in a way apologizing for all he's done. Mike is about to shoot him, but he doesn't, and they hug each other in tears.
At that moment he hears on the radio that the rescue team is passing by his whereabouts right now, and they need him to make his exact location known as they can't stop to look for him. Simultaneously, Mike starts to get shot at by two people over the hill, and sees that the one thing he can use to signal his location, the flare, is out of his reach. Right when he's about to give in, Tommy appears next to him alive and well, going over the facts with him and telling him what he needs to do. Mike, with the last reserve of strength he has left, shoots and eliminates the hostiles and starts digging a ditch to jump in as quickly as he can. His resolve to now propose to his girlfriend gives him the courage he needs, and he jumps.
Nothing happens; there's no explosion. He finds that the mine he'd stepped on was in fact a tin can, probably placed there by the Berber's daughter when she was alive. Relieved and happy to be alive despite the non-lethal gunshot wounds he sustained in the standoff with the two hostiles, he shoots the flare and is rescued. Back home at the airport, Jenny is waiting for him with happy tears in her eyes. Even before hugging her, he drops to one knee in front of her.
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