Lebanon (Israel)

Israeli film about the first day in the Lebanon war in 1982.  A tank full of young disobedient soldiers (I would have wanted to courtmartial the lot of them) on a quick simple exercise in seemingly cleverly avoiding International Law gets lost and turns to chaos and fear.

I had high expectations and some were let down, but a good film overall.  The film did an excellent job portraying the emotional immaturity and insecurity of certain soldiers.  (Immaturity sounds judgmental but that is not how I mean it, remember that military service in Israel as in many countries is mandatory for all 18 year olds, whether they want to volunteer for war or not.)  Film does a good job showing the chaos of multiple points of view--young reluctant flagrantly disrespectful soldiers, older macho war heroes, profiteerers, prisoners of war, tortured civilians--without being a tour of bravado and glory and heroism as would be seen in most US war films or any paltry Tom Cruise ditty.  This chaos of multiplicity was strengthened by the film's use of dialogue in multiple languages, when no individual could speak all.  Only the viewer had the luxury of translated subtitles and the "full view".

The set was the inside of a tank : brilliant set for claustrophobia of wartime (nods to the submarine in Das Boot.)

My main criticism of the film was from a technical stand-point.  Oftentimes the camera takes the POV of the artilleryman, who is shaking with fear on his first day of war, terrorized with the notion of killing (even an enemy aiming at him with a gun), and forever plagued with his acts after making his first kill.  The camera looks down the trigger view ("periscope"?) and the viewer of the film becomes the viewer and artilleryman, shocked with the scenes of war.  This was all a great idea, but the beef I have is that the camera/artilleryman kept recentering his view to get the perfect "money shot" of what he was looking at (destroyed buildings, half-blown up soldiers/civilians, even a fellow soldier backing into an alley to take a piss.)  All angles the soldier in shock would find himself locked into, including the urinating colleague who of course quickly gestures to him to mind his own business and look away.  But all jarringly and irrevocably lost when the camera re-became a camera and constantly recentered to get "the money shot", which a shocked barely adult soldier would not do.  That gave the film a dogmatic edge, as if to teach of the atrocities of war rather than let the truth be just that, flawed images of horror.  So close to being a brilliant essay in "show, don't tell," that ended up "tell, tell, tell."  Still, I am left with the raw youngness of these soldiers, their being thoroughly unable to comprehend their mission emotionally, and the consequences of getting lost and losing control in war.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1483831/