I didn't see this film as "anti-war." Seeing Israel come out ahead in the end, I said to a friend afterward, "Let this be a lesson to anyone in the future who thinks that fighting with people whose elder family members had been put in ovens is a good idea."
In an obvious anti-war sentiment, Gitai’s camera shies from nothing. We see severed limbs, misshaped bodies, and men struggling with feeble breaths in knee-high mud swamps. We see fear and chaos and moments of bonding that come as silent screams over witnessed horror. The realistic feel is enhanced by long, static camera shots, which make the scenes inescapable and multi-dimensional in terms of their emotional impact. This, after all, is a war movie about a unit of non-professional soldiers. They are disorganized, afraid, and for the most part unfit for the pure physical challenges of their situation. They are just average men, with regular jobs, girlfriends, and family histories. Their vulnerability paints a haunting picture of the destructiveness of war. The fact that we never actually see the invading army nor hear any political or patriotic rhetoric makes the exploits of the characters heartbreaking and deeply personal. They could be anybody, anywhere, at any war, and regardless of the outcome of the war, they will be forever scarred. --Craig Sones Cornell & Anna-Maria Petricelli of CinemaSense and CinemaSense.Com
Perhaps I was wrong about Gitai, but at least his argument holds no sway over my convictions.
In the classic Hollywood war film, great men lead others to seize the hill, take control, master the world. This is consistent with Americans' view of themselves as free agents, free to reinvent ourselves, free to remake the world in our image. In Gitai's film, everyone's fate is linked to everyone else's — and all are victims. Depicting war as chaos, he makes a powerful argument for peace. Gitai told Privett that he'd wanted to make this film for years but felt he could only after peace negotiations began, perhaps because he feared his sympathetic depiction of Israeli soldiers would have been taken as supporting the Israeli right; some of Gitai's earlier films were censored in Israel on the grounds that they were too pro-Arab. Here he's depicted what could be almost any war today. And by arguing that the characters' fates are intertwined and that no one is free to conquer the world, he not only links his characters to the Arabs, but all of us to one another. ---Fred Camper