I’m always blown away by productions such as these, where’s it’s obvious that great technical lengths were taken in order to get it right, and I’m not sure how people weren’t catastrophically burned while making this reportedly $40 million movie (it looks twice as expensive if not more). The rugged and masculine ensemble that was put together for Only the Brave is rock-solid, providing the picture with an sense of authenticity, which also extends to the seamless and absolutely “how’d they do that?” visual effects similar to last year’s astonishing Deepwater Horizon, there’s a sense of technical verisimilitude that helps to ratchet up the increasingly ramping suspense, and because there isn’t a shot in Only the Brave that looks visually false, the viewer is sucked into the events without ever considering that what they’re watching isn’t real. Very much crafted in the Peter Berg spirit, this is a manly movie about tough men doing their dirty, dangerous jobs, never once thinking about anything else but the lives of strangers and the welfare of the environment, even if it means not coming home at the end of the day.

Written with intelligence, dignity, and macho-swagger by Ken Nolan (Black Hawk Down) and Eric Warren Singer (American Hustle), the screenplay traces some of the key members of the squad, various supervisors and town officials, and most importantly, in one key instance, on the wife of one of the men caught up in the middle of the conflagration, thus giving the audience a richer viewing experience, as well as making it an ever more emotional film than you’d expect from the already inherently heat-tugging material. Joseph Kosinski’s heroically sad film Only the Brave tells the true story of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, a group of firemen working in Prescott, Arizona who died in the tragic Yarnell Hill blaze in 2013 out of the 20 man crew, there was only one survivor.

Only the brave movie times