Two soldiers in a tank: (outtake from "Lebanon" dir. Samuel Maoz)
Lebanon, the first feature from Israeli filmmaker Samuel Maoz, takes us in with a platoon of Israeli soldiers at the beginning of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The story is drawn from the personal recollections of writer-director Maoz, who was an actual participant in that attack. As events play out, the camera stays entirely within a tank to which four of the soldiers are assigned, so we are always either looking at them or through their eyes out of the tank's gunsight. Over the span of their brief first mission, the soldiers' mental state devolves from apprehension to delirium as their simple directive to search an already-airstruck Lebanese town leads them into a nightmarish trap.

"Man is Steel. This tank is only Iron," reads a legend inscribed inside the tank. But none of the four men in the tank shows any semblance of heroism, or even bravery. They appear to be there despite themselves, reluctantly going where they have been ordered to go. This is evident early on, when an argument breaks out over who is to stay awake and keep watch on the first night. It's clear that nobody is really in charge, nobody wants to follow anybody else, and these are just a bunch of scared boys trying to find their way through a dangerous maze.

An Israeli tank rolls through a Southern Lebanese fieldThere are no heroes in Lebanon, only victims and their unwilling, petrified tormentors. To his credit, Maoz goes a long way in graphically depicting the horrific casualties—both physical and psychological—inflicted upon Lebanese civilians by the Israeli Defense Forces. Among the standout scenes is an extended, gut-wrenching sequence where a Lebanese mother (Reymond Amsalem) searches desperately for her murdered daughter in the debris of her street. Still, there's no denying that we are meant to identify with the Israelis, and feel their emotions as they take on their ignoble assignment.

But even though we spend the whole film in very tight quarters with them, it's difficult to empathize with these boys—and not just because they are ultimately tools of the Israeli war machine. As characters they are drawn with an extremely broad brush, and Maoz's attempts to give them depth usually fall flat or backfire—as when Shmulik (Yoav Donat) tells a story about his teenaged tryst with a teacher that's presumably meant to be emotional and poignant but ends up sounding crass and pointless. This lack of depth significantly diminishes the film's overall power, and leaves it outclassed by 2008's similarly-themed Waltz With Bashir.

Politically, Lebanon (which won the Golden Lion at Venice last year) can be read as an effective synechdoche, the soldiers' miscalculated and disastrous mission standing in for the Lebanon war as a whole. Beyond that, there is little by way of history or politics here, and the film more or less falls in with the latest mini-trend in war movies: embed the audience with a platoon, ratchet up the tension, and ignore the context and the bigger issues surrounding the particular war being depicted. Yes, in Lebanon (as in The Hurt Locker) war is hell, but war is also a fact. "War is supposed to be dangerous" says troopleader Gamil (Zohar Shtrauss), as though he is stating the painfully obvious; but that is the most dangerous thing about films like this: they begin with war and brutality as a given, and so ask us to accept it as such, no questions asked.

Read the New York Times review of Lebanon.

Omid Arabian is a writer in Los Angeles. He is the film editor of the Levantine Review.