‘The Covenant’ Falls Back on Hollywood’s Same Old Orientalism

The two-pronged story, penned by Ritchie alongside Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies, first concerns the rescue of a hard-headed U.S. soldier, Sgt. John Kinley (Jake Gyllenhaal), from Taliban forces in 2018, when his fierce local interpreter, Ahmed (Dar Salim), ferries him to safety across unforgiving terrain. Upon Kinley’s return home to the United States, the film’s second half begins, as he embarks on a tireless mission to ensure that Ahmed, his wife and his newborn child are all provided the visas and refuge they were promised, though the American government has left their safety mired in red tape. With his back against the wall, and with the Taliban slowly closing in on Ahmed and his family for helping him, Kinley returns to the battlefield as a civilian in order to pay his debts, with the intention of saving and extracting Ahmed himself.

The story, while exciting in its fiction, touches on a real-life dynamic that sees numerous Middle Eastern translators used and subsequently discarded by American institutions. By giving Kinley a perilous mission in the vein of Saving Private Ryan, the film places the humanity and safety of an Afghan character front and center—a rarity for Hollywood cinema, in an age where the Muslim “other” has been a frequent source of villainy. However, despite the seeming altruism of this premise, the camera often tells a different story.

The story, while exciting in its fiction, touches on a real-life dynamic that sees numerous Middle Eastern translators used and subsequently discarded by American institutions.

The Covenant decouples sentimentality from the equation. The two men rarely get along but are bound by an abstract sense of duty, and while this theoretically emphasizes Ahmed as worthy of saving simply as a matter of benevolence (rather than personal attachment), the film stumbles in its attempts to grant him complete humanity. Part of this is owed to the protracted middle section fixating entirely on Kinley’s rescue attempts from afar, via frustrating phone calls with U.S. immigration officials—Ahmed, in these scenes, exists only in Kinley’s imagination. What little we know about Ahmed, we’re told largely by other American soldiers, rather than by his own actions or ethos. He claims to have signed up for money, though as another unit-member whispers to Kinley, the interpreter harbors a personal grudge against the Taliban, with whom he once had business dealings. However, the complexity of this dynamic, as a potentially incendiary moral struggle between Ahmed’s past and his present, never rears its head. Instead, his grudge manifests only as brutality that serves American interests. To Kinley, and to the camera, Ahmed is useful for dispensing with Taliban fighters with ruthless efficiency. However, the emotional impetus for this violence, and its impact on Ahmed himself, are omitted from the narrative, even though the lingering effects of war are central to Kinley’s story, as they often are in Hollywood films about American soldiers.

Where Kinley is granted close-ups in dilemmatic scenes of guilt or emotional reckoning, Ahmed’s close-ups are limited to decision-making in a more superficial, plot-centric sense. When the camera pushes in on Kinley, it does so in charged moments born from his internal anguish over what he owes to Ahmed, as an American inadvertently roped into his betrayal. However, the camera ends up similarly betraying Ahmed. Where Ed Wild’s fluid cinematography injects Kinley’s emotional journey with adrenaline, it pushes in on Ahmed only to emphasize decisions and story beats that give rise to action, rather than emotional conflict. Usually, the camera’s focus and momentum center Ahmed whenever he needs to decide how best to assist Kinley; like the U.S. government, the frame uses Ahmed as a tool for violence, and discards him shortly thereafter.

Like the U.S. government, the frame uses Ahmed as a tool for violence, and discards him shortly thereafter.

On the other hand, Salim imbues even Ahmed’s silences with intensity and allure, so while the character may not amount to much on paper, he feels magnetic whenever he’s in frame. Ritchie, ever the stylist, charges his camera at Salim, turning him into a slick action hero regardless of whether this conjures substantive humanity. However, the camera’s occasional reverence for Ahmed is entirely contingent upon him serving the United States, i.e. the “right” side in this conflict, despite the geopolitical complications and disastrous results of America’s occupation—let alone any moral complications that might arise on Ahmed’s behalf.

Even if one were to grant The Covenant the benefit of doubt based on its structure—its unwavering focus on Kinley in the second half rarely allows for either a top-down perspective, or a more detailed focus on Ahmed—the way it frames the rest of its Afghan characters, including and especially its Taliban villains, creates a cascading effect, further flattening any sense of non-white humanity. The United States’ occupation is also treated as a virtue, even though both sides in the conflict—the U.S. armed forces and the Taliban—depend on the ideologies of their subordinates manifesting through force. Innocent Afghan civilians are occasionally inconvenienced by the United States, but vitally, they’re never violated on-screen, because the American soldiers are granted a narrative omniscience about which Afghan targets deserve lethal force, and they always happen to be right. In contrast, the Taliban are portrayed with a requisite ruthlessness against any and all targets. Both sides have violent methods, but only one side’s violence—that of the Taliban—is treated as stemming from a violent outlook. The other side’s violence is a de-facto act of goodness.

This dichotomy, pitting monstrousness against inherent humanity, also extends to the way the camera and the editing capture agony and death. It’s the Lone Survivor effect—Peter Berg’s 2013 Afghanistan war film starring Mark Wahlberg, with which The Covenant shares stylistic DNA. In both movies, the visual recognition of suffering is a luxury granted only to American soldiers. While anonymous Taliban henchmen are quickly disposed of, dropping out of frame after swift headshots render their bodies limp, a bullet striking an American torso slows down time, as the camera masochistically zeroes in on blood spilt in sacrifice, not unlike Mel Gibson’s approach to The Passion of the Christ. Death becomes a virtue, revealing the inner lives of American soldiers during their dying breaths—whether through flashbacks in Lone Survivor, or recognizable human pain in The Covenant—whereas their enemies are barely granted recognizable features.

To make this differentiation easier for audiences, the movie falls back on the of Islamophobic and orientalist fears that have plagued mainstream Hollywood for two decades. The villains are often coded with wraps and headscarves that obscure their faces, and thus their intentions—but also, their humanity too. Whether or not The Covenant (or any other film) ought to approach the Taliban with more nuance, the result of this approach is enmity being projected not onto individuals with motives, but onto faceless shapes who embody western fears of eastern terror through their concealed appearance.

When “the enemy” is so often identified only by their “Muslim-ness” or “Middle Eastern-ness,” their culture becomes the target.

This dynamic isn’t limited to Hollywood war films. Science fiction movies like Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) continue the entrenched traditions of classics like Star Wars (1977), wherein alien marketplaces are based on Middle Eastern bazaars, and alien costumes often resemble Bedouin garb; a literal dehumanization. Meanwhile, action movies like 300 (2007) and John Wick: Chapter 3 (2019) trade in cultural shorthand similar to that of The Covenant, wherein the masking and obscuring of Middle Eastern faces makes them easier to dispense with from a moral standpoint (albeit with the added logistical function of anonymizing stuntmen). The latter makes for an especially apt comparison to Ritchie’s film, given the scene in which Wick, an American aggressor, infiltrates a Moroccan fort and kills numerous henchmen with the help of attack dogs. All the guards in question have faces obscured by keffiyeh—Arab head-wraps similar to the Afghan shemagh—resulting in violence that mirrors The Covenant, in which American invaders kill faceless enemies, whose only defining characteristic is their traditional Middle Eastern clothing.

When “the enemy” is so often identified only by their “Muslim-ness” or “Middle Eastern-ness,” their culture becomes the target.

Film after film, this specific form of cultural recognition soon becomes entwined with projections of fear and hostility through cinematic language, even when otherwise capable films like The Covenant seek to make heroes out of characters like Ahmed. As noble as Ritchie’s attempts may be, his movie trades in too many existing tropes and stereotypes—intentionally or otherwise—to be truly subversive in its humanization of people frequently villainized on screen.