"Lebanon": Intellectual masturbation (with gun oil).

Is...is that garlic?

I remember the days when the dynamic movie-going duo—that is, my dad and I—were once a dynamic trio. I refer, of course, to the days when my grandpa used to be with us.

At the center of this inter-generational exchange were war movies. It’s an expansive genre that each of us had been exposed to at least some point in our lives. Each of us could relate to it in one way or another. The ultimate male-bonding experience, right? That said, 1998 was a big year for us.

As you might remember, that was the year that “Saving Private Ryan” was released. And for those of you who have a really good memory, that was also the year that Terence Malick’s “The Thin Red Line”, an adaptation of James Jones’s 1962 novel of the same name, found a brief home in American cinemas.

It’s a little bit hazy now but I can distinctly remember the two being compared. What I can be sure of is that one had a huge deal of popular support while another simply had the backing of critics. While both were sentimental in their own right, can you guess which one was remembered the world over?

Long story short, I remember my grandpa being vehemently upset by Malick’s film. As he put it, “It just didn’t make any sense.”

Fast-forward a few years and freeze the frame on me in my late teens. I’m re-watching “Line” and I’m quite impressed with what I find. Long panoramas of kunai grass bristling with invisible Nipponese death. Fountains of flame arcing through the night sky. Bamboo thickets, blue lagoons, butterflies, soaring eagles. Plus lots of smoke and gunfire and pathos. It’s poetic, haunting, atmospheric, philosophic, star-studded and totally, utterly anti-war in every political and social sense. Sure, I can agree. It’s a staggeringly beautiful film, technically and aesthetically. But I can completely understand why people like my grandpa (who actually lived those years) when they said it was a complete mound of horseshit. And in the grander scheme of things, I tend to agree.

Why? Let’s take a look at a more recent film: the Israeli war flick simply known as “Lebanon”.

Winner of the 2009 Gold Lion award at the 66th Venice International Film Festival, Samuel Maoz’s piece fixes its sights (quite literally) on an Israeli tank crew during the first days of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. And the entire story unfolds within the tank itself, leaving not for one moment.

On paper it sounds fascinating, almost groundbreaking. And it’s not the first film to experiment with the challenges presented by a closed setting. The most notable example comes from our friend Mr. Hitchcock via the Leopold-Loeb mash-up in “Rope”. A more recent example is the masterful socio-political thriller “Buried”. Still most others preside in the realm of horror; like the Shyamalan-penned “Devil”, which takes place entirely in an elevator chock-full of paranoid passengers, or…well…another movie called “Elevator” with the exact same premise.

I guess that’s the recurrent theme: all movies that have one location must have one-word titles.

But I digress. “Lebanon”. I suppose my distraction derives mainly from the film itself: it is quite distracting. Not in a diverting way in which my curiosities are engaged to the fullest but rather in the way you might gaze out into the sunshine while you’re stuck inside a classroom listening to someone give you a lecture on morality. That’s kind of where “Lebanon” sits on the shelf.

It’s a bloated 93-minute regurgitation of every virulently anti-war film that’s been made since “All Quiet on the Western Front”. Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong about that but if there were anything notable at all in Maoz’s vision then it would have to be the jarring camera movement.

The film chronicles the crew’s journey through a confusing array of cloudy moral dilemmas as they follow a platoon of IDF paratroopers through orchards and bombed-out towns. And that’s about all that happens.

The rest of the time is spent in Greengrass-style chaos.

The gunsight (e.g. camera) moves with such clarity and helter-skelter ADD that it’s hard to believe there's a 50-ton behemoth operating behind it.

Mainly, we see things through the perspective of Schmulik, the curly-haired recruit cum gunner whose telescopic sights are the eyes of the film. Along with his commander, the loader and the driver, the crew shows little semblance of being an actual military unit, either in the brotherly sense or in the professional one. So if ever there was a movie where it appeared as though a few guys were plucked off the street and thrown into uniforms so as to play army: this is it.

The utter lack of bearing and realism is normally something you can get away with. Especially in an art film.

Here, Maoz merely sacrifices realism for atmosphere and it shows. If one were to analogize his creative license in the film, one only need imagine an the elderly driver who has let their car slip into ‘drive’ instead of ‘reverse’ moments before plowing through the storefront of the DMV.

The crew constantly bickers over pointless affairs such as who gets to go to sleep on first watch. There is no sense of command control, geography, tactics or self-preservation. Only what appears to be self-righteousness. None of the baby-faced Rambos seem to know how to use their own equipment. The loader—a fiery youth known only as Hertzel---often browbeats his commanding officer without recourse. And none of them even seem to be wearing a uniform. In all, plausibility seems to have taken a long vacation while larger questions like “Why am I here?” party it up.

What could have been a unique exercise in the exploration is substituted for shots of pooled diesel and belts of machine gun ammo, as if these were enough to inspire a meditation on the uglier side of man.

Even with sprinkles of minutiae, like a pair of Uzi-toting phalangists, the clumsy effort can’t be saved from its own torpid recycling of clichés.

The rest of the time is spent parading the mangled corpses of women, children and dead animals in a move to inspire tears and/or vomit. Uh-uh, Mr. Maoz. I’m not playing ball with you this time. The more you watch the more you realize that it’s not a film about war. It’s a film about how a pacifist thinks a war should look to everyone else and, in so doing, robbing the experience of any true moral complexity in the service of one recurrent theme: War is bad. And why is it bad? It just is. We don’t need to explore what drives it or why after 10,000 years we continue to do it, just so long as we know that it’s bad and that people who participate in it are bad. It’s the same thing that happened with Malick back in ’98.

Recently I’ve heard “Lebanon” being compared to such great war films as the WWII submarine epic “Das Boot.” I can only assume that this is because both films share a gritty, industrial, claustrophobic quality. However I think we’d be doing a serious disservice to Mr. Peterson if we did.

What makes films like “Boot” so great are not so much the politics that underscore it but the sense of realism that captures those politics in their natural state. It doesn’t force turpitude on its characters in some perverse hope that their complicity will be revealed. Rather it shows ordinary people forced to the extremes of behavior and how those boundaries can impact us, fragile and faulty though we may be.

Maoz himself is a veteran of the same war and this only serves to confound me further. In recent years, the West has been privy to a number of notable works from IDF veterans including (but not limited to) 2008’s animated fantasia “Waltz with Bashir” or the more understated “Beaufort” in 2007.

Heavy-handed though they may be, I find it laudable that the Israeli film industry is encouraging these types of movies to be made. Nay, it is essential to the healing process. And yet, I find myself wondering more and more if the ‘three strike’ rule applies over there as much as it does over here.