LEBANON

Joining the overflowing mass of recent war films, “Lebanon”, like most of its predecessors, brings nothing new to a genre that desperately needs either a rest or a potentially impossible new perspective.

The majority of “Lebanon” takes place within an Israeli tank on the first day of the 1982 Lebanon War, seen through the eyes of the four Israeli Soldiers inside the tank. First time writer/director Samuel Moaz effortlessly captures this claustrophobia, stretching his low budget to its limits with a rather ingenious use of sound design, which make the tank’s rarely seen surroundings as vivid as anything seen on screen.

This sleek sound design is matched by Moaz’s sleek use of the camera, but to much less success. Late in the film, after the tank has been bruised and battered, one of the soldiers remarks, “You can’t win a war in this mess.” Though the not-so-subtle undertones of such an utterance in a war movie is all too apparent by now, the line brings up one of the main contradictions of the film – namely, the look of the film just isn’t messy. Each shot is so meticulously calculated and composed that the cinematic quality of said shots prevents the audience from ever buying into the urgent reality of the events. Accompanying this lack of realism is the forceful nature by which Moaz shoves his anti-war agenda down the audiences’ collective throats, utilizing every overused war image in the book: dead animals, soot-filled children, mothers desperately trying to relocate their lost child, and even the World Trade Centers, all culminating in one of the most blatantly contrived and symbolic final gestures to end a film in recent memory.

Yet for anyone who has seen even half of the onslaught of war films audiences have been subjugated to in the past few years, the final message of “Lebanon” is all but known before the lights even go down.

Lebanon screens October 1 at 9:30 pm and October 2 at 3:00 pm at Alice Tully Hall. Expect a theatrical release Spring 2010.