lebanon

It took filmmaker Samuel Moab almost thirty years to tell his story. It has been that long since the first day of the Lebanon war—June 6, 1982—when he was just twenty years old, and I was a few days off being born. As I was rolling around in the comfort of my mother’s womb, Moab sweated and shook behind the trigger of a tank cannon, tasked with the job of shooting anything that moved. It’s a thankless job: don’t shoot, and you may put all your comrades in danger; shoot, and you might kill an innocent civilian. Moab attempted to make this film years before, but couldn’t, the horrors of his experience too raw to recount. Finally, he was able to finish the script and make the movie he needed to. On a tight budget, and shot entirely within the confines of a tank—bar the brief opening and closing scenes—what he produced has won him accolades worldwide.

I will do everything in my power to not see war movies, generally. It seems awful and shallow to avoid what is a grim reality for a huge part of both history and present, but I usually find the machismo and bloodshed just too sickening. You’re much more likely to find me at a 3D kids’ flick laughing at a fart joke than in an arthouse cinema stroking my beard about the poignancy of camera angles. Still, when a movie receives as much attention as Lebanon it seems a good reason to get over my dislike and watch something so worthwhile.

Shmulik is a gunner, dropped into the belly of an Israeli Defence Force tank with loader Hertzel, driver Yigul, and officer Assi. They meet and shake hands, then are mobilised immediately to get to a road and wait for further instructions. When a car approaches, they are given their task: shoot to their left, then to their right, and if they don’t move, shoot out their engine. As someone who has previously “only ever shot barrels”, Shmulik freezes, endangering everyone around him; from that moment, the stage is set as real people—not Rambo-type heroes with oversized muscles and bandannas—are shown fighting with their emotions and each other as they struggle to survive the first day of the Lebanon War. Outside, the unit’s commander and his soldiers are face-to-face with the horror, with hostage-takers and the dead or injured, and trying with the tank to clear a freshly razed town. As the situation worsens, those in charge must deal with changes of plan, lack of backup and the subversiveness of inexperienced and frightened soldiers.

After seeing Buried and Devil I worried that 2010 was overdoing the claustrophobia* movie, but this felt much different. It is still an oppressive atmosphere, crowded into a tank with four men whose only view to the outside world is through crosshairs, but at least there are other people to see. With the faces of those destroyed by the war in sharp relief, however, it is not a beautiful world, but a devastating one. As one man stares down the sight, sharing a table in a town with a friend lying dead and bloody opposite, the trauma of the experience for everyone involved is made clear.

Immersive from the moment Shmulik lowers himself into the tank, Lebanon is a gripping and awful movie, with only one real moment of levity during a tale of an ill-placed hard-on in front of a teacher tasked to accompany a teenage Shmulik home after the death of his father. It’s hard to crack a smile during the story anyway, told as it is to improve the mood of the men in the tank, feeling alone and desperate in their dirty, aged, shelled tank with the walls covered in post-attack oil and soup croutons.

The sound design is ominous and alarming, the cinematography amazing when you consider the limited space. It is not a comfortable movie, soaked in blood and tension, but with tender moments as soldiers try to reach out with humanity during even the worst times in war. The devastation and tension of the first ten minutes does have the detrimental effect of causing the rest of the movie to feel slower and (mildly) less traumatising.

In summary: Meets Expectations, which were high after the glowing reviews. Lebanon is an important and devastating movie, and I am full of admiration for Samuel Moab in making such a personal film.

*Chris told me I wasn’t allowed to use the c-word word in my review because “everyone else has”, but that’s like not saying the word “tank” in this movie. If you suffer from claustrophobia, you probably shouldn’t see it, unless you’re at the Open Air Cinema and you’re driving home afterwards in a convertible.

the hurt locker

Sometimes there are movies where the reasons behind the titles are clear. Croupier, for example, is about a croupier. No surprise there. Kill Bill is about killing some flute player called William who talks at the speed of snail. Amelie is about a girl called Amelie. You see them and can leave the cinema happy that whoever decides on the title made the right choice.

Then sometimes you leave a movie like The Hurt Locker and think to yourself, “What a great movie! Where is the bathroom? And where the hell did the title come from?” Not once is the phrase mentioned during the movie. John Hurt isn’t in it, nor a particularly significant locker. A consultation with the IMDB boards reveal that a hurt locker is somewhere you threaten to put people. As in, if your name is Inigo Montoya, and you’re standing in front of the person who killed your father, you’ll probably be putting them in a hurt locker. So there you go. Now you don’t have to wonder about it.

Not that you have much of a chance to. The Hurt Locker won seventy-eight Oscars for a reason. Whether it’s the best picture of the year is entirely subjective, but it’s better on the whole than Pocahontas-ripoff Avatar, though not better than the first fifteen minutes of Up. Still, it is an engrossing, tense and well-shot movie, and I have no qualms with it winning its seventy-eight Oscars.

As a rule, I hate war movies. Along with Westerns and Big Sappy Romances, I avoid them the best I can. Some suck me in, but generally I run far away from movies that involve blood, sweat, dust or tears. The Hurt Locker’s hype palled up with my excitement for the idea of a woman winning a Best Director Oscar for the first time, and there I was, stealing other people’s seats at the cinema so I could be closer to the screen and sucked in to this world.

Apparently it’s set in Iraq in 2004, though you’d never know the date (here I can’t help but mention the surfeit of anachronisms, like iPod touches and XBOX360s). William James has just joined the Bravo company’s bomb disposal squad after a brief cameo from previous team leader and excellent accent Guy Pearce as Matt Thompson. James is played by Jeremy Renner and is almost immediately shown as the kind of guy who thrives on risks and could be found in a B-grade movie yelling, “I don’t play by the rules, okay?” while their fellow team members scream, “You’re reckless!” He runs, not walks carefully, to bombs; throws smokescreen grenades without warning to his fellow team members; and takes off his bomb suit because it’s uncomfortable. His partners, by-the-book JT Sanborn and nest of fear Owen Eldridge, are less than pleased to have their lives treated so lightly, and so they should be.

But Bigelow’s strength lies in the fact that you don’t actually hate Renner. He’s there as a saviour, after all, and spends every assignment in what is essentially a suicide mission. He jokes and plays, does his job excellently, and is buddy-buddy with the local gangsta-talking ten-year-old DVD salesperson. He’s human, and for him, war is a drug. Disarming bombs is his fix.

The Hurt Locker, however, wasn’t quite as tense as I was led to believe. I wonder if it was because I went in imagining that in a movie about a bomb disposal unit, there was a chance that every character would die, and therefore didn’t invest myself in them as much as I usually do. I still cared for the characters, especially Eldridge, who was the most anxious about his job, his strengths, and his sanity, but I distanced myself from them.

Some unexpected star power in Ralph Fiennes, Evangeline Lilly and David Morse appear to remind us this isn’t a documentary, though the three team members have been around, but not entirely memorable for me until now. The movie is well-cast, beautifully shot, tense, gritty, and bloody. It manages to have less gore than you could expect for such a film bar one particularly upsetting scene regarding the disposal of a body bomb, and is probably the sweariest movie I’ve seen since the first three minutes of Four Weddings and a Funeral. It’s definitely a movie worth watching, as it does not glorify war as much as show how much it is deadly, terrifying, and able to alter the lives of soldiers irreparably.