Movies Reviews

Lebanon – Movie Review

By Ron Wilkinson Aug 31, 2010, 15:20 GMT

I had just turned 19 in May 1982. Life was good. I was in love. Then I was asked to leave on a military base and being the shooter\'s first tank to cross the Lebanese border. This should be a one-day mission was simple but one day in hell. I never killed anyone before that terrible day. I became a real killing machine. Something there is dead in me. Remove ...more

The most intense war film since “Das Boot.” There are no winners in war.

Writer/director Samuel Maoz has created one of the best war films of all time with this riveting saga filmed entirely inside the turret of a tank at war. The film is even more compelling because he was in the tank turret himself during the 1982 Lebanon war.

He uses memories he probably would rather forget to bring the horrendous reality of war to the screen and to emphasize the complete lack of winners in armed conflict. Some live and some die but everybody loses.

One has to believe that Maoz saw the classic war thriller “Das Boot” that was nominated for a Golden Globe in 1982 and six Oscars in 1983 and became a believer. He became a believer in the claustrophobic stink, grime and muck of war.

The horror of watching men, women and children being blown up and burned to death as a direct result of the death wielded by soldiers who are barely out of their teens.

The beauty of great war movies is in the depiction of the universal terror and trauma visited on both sides of the trench. Even the winning side suffers terribly. In this film the invading Israeli infantry, with tank support, is a perfectly trained machine. They are doing all the right things except killing people when they have to. They have been trained for everything except the ultimate.

The film studies the soul searching and after effects of war and the writer director uses his own scars to populate the screenplay with the characters and lines that make up the execution of war.

To delay is human, but the death caused by delay is even greater than the death caused by the right reaction at the right time. These are decisions being made by 20 year-olds, conscripts pulled out of their classes to inhabit and operate the most fearsome killing machine of our time; the tank.

This film won the Venice Golden Lion, Nazareno Taddei Award and the SIGNIS Award - Honorable Mention at Venice and could be headed for more awards if its raw energy hits it s mark with the popular critics. As with many excellent films, it brutal honesty may be its downfall. This is no date flick.

Zohar Strauss won the award for Best Supporting Actor from the Israeli Film Academy in 2009 for his role as the tough brigade commander on the verge of breakdown. Reymond Amsalem’s part as a Lebanese mother searching for her dead family in the middle of an intense firefight has to be one of the most intense performances in any film at any time.

It is short but packs a wallop that is huge even compared to the spine tingling madness that pervades the rest of the movie.

This is an extremely intense and honest look at the most humbling experience of humankind. It is more intense and personal than “Hurt Locker” but is so totally lacking in production frills that it may not attract much of an American audience.

The coolness is gone and in its place is fear, failure, panic and the omnipresent feeling that nothing but a lifetime of nightmares is in store for the young heroes who have made the tank their home.

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Directed and Written by: Samuel Maoz
Release: August 6, 2010
MPAA: Rated R for disturbing bloody war violence, language including sexual references, and some nudity
Runtime: 93 minutes
Country: Israel / France / UK
Language: Hebrew / Arabic / French / English
Color: Color