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Created Sep 03, 2010 07:42AM PST • Edited Oct 13, 2023 07:13PM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Great 4.0

   The heart of a battle-tank turns into a heart of darkness for four soldiers – softies – thrust into the horror of war. The obvious comparison to Das Boot captures Lebanon’s ironclad claustrophobia and blinkered view. Yet, Apocalypse Now seems more fitting an antecedent given how these unwitting draftees get led into a brutal quagmire they’re constitutionally ill-equipped to handle.

   Devoid of context but dripping in verisimilitude, Samuel Maoz’s anti-war movie serves as cathartic confessional for his experiences as a conscripted tank gunner in the First Lebanon war. He skillfully shows how fear leads to unnecessary death, which leads to overreaction, which leads to more unnecessary death. Ultimately though, war kills indiscriminately, in the process stripping its participants down to their elemental natures, free of pretense at last.

   The movie shows how this occurred to the profoundly unprepared boy crew of the tank. More graphically, a tragically bereft Lebanese mother loses first her family and then her dress, her nakedness biblical in pathos.

   Grace does occur in war, for those with the right code. The movie shows this on several occasions, such as when an Israeli soldier covers the naked mother, respecting her dignity even in the middle of a firefight. On the flip side, the movie shows terrorists using the mother and her family as human shields, a sickening taste of Islamic terrorism’s now common fundamental tactic.

   Lebanon becomes the second great war movie to emerge from Israel in the past year. This makes sense since “the country has seen more than its share of wars, including the strategically misconceived one depicted in [both movies], and Jews have been central authors and practitioners of humanism,” as I noted in reviewing Waltz with Bashir, the other – superior – movie about the First Lebanon war.

   Ultimately Lebanon can only be recommended for those who feel a personal connection to its war or who never pass up a great war movie, no matter how grim it turns out to be.

4. Acting

   Great 4.0

   The four member tank crew ably show the transition from callow youth to shell-shocked veterans.

   The most memorable performers are outside the tank however.

   • Zohar Strauss as a hardbitten commando Major.
   • Reymonde Amsellem as a war torn mother.
   • Ashraf Barhom as a Phalangist irregular.

5. Male Stars Great 4.0

6. Female Stars Great 4.0

7. Female Costars Really Great 4.5

8. Male Costars Really Great 4.5

10. Film

    Very Good 3.5

    Writer-director Samuel Maoz makes the tank a living character in his film: sweating, belching, even seeing. Indeed, the only view the tank crew have of the outside world is through the robotic gun sight. Thus, every external person is caught in the crosshairs of death.

    He also deftly uses the fetid water that pools on the tank’s floor to show the rough vibrations and to reflect the claustrophobic action of the men above.

11. Direction Great 4.0

12. Play Very Good 3.5

13. Music Very Good 3.5

14. Visuals Great 4.0
15. Content

16. Edge

    Sordid 2.9

    War violence at its most visceral and with all its glamour shed.

17. Sex Innocent 1.4

18. Violence Savage 3.6

19. Rudeness Nasty 3.6

21. Reality

    Glib 1.1

    “Lebanon” stands as an Israeli epithet for war at its most traumatic, just as “Nam” did for a generation of Americans. As with the Vietnam war, Israel’s Lebanon war of the early 80s was an expeditionary campaign not seen as existentially important to many on the home-front.

    It also put the IDF in kahoots with some seriously bad allies, namely the Phalangists who are briefly and chillingly represented in Lebanon by a thug who enthusiastically describes to a Syrian prisoner the torturous death planned for him.

    What’s a Syrian soldier doing in Lebanon asks the naive tank driver? This too points up a brutal reality of Israel’s neighborhood: the frequent subjugation of one country by another, in this case of Lebanon by Syria. No wonder wars keep happening.

22. Circumstantial Glib 1.4

23. Biological Natural 1.0

24. Physical Natural 1.0