"Man is steel. The tank is merely iron."

Four young soldiers who have never seen battle are at the forefront of the 1982 Lebanon Israel War. They get their orders to cross into Lebanon and aid a platoon of paratroopers as they sweep up after the bombing the night before. It isn't long before war becomes real to them and they find themselves ill-prepared for the experience.

Lebanon is based on writer-director Shmuel Maoz's experience as a tank gunner. It is a time that haunted him for twenty-five years. As he says of that time in press notes: "When I returned, my mother embraced me, weeping and expressing her gratitude to my deceased father, to God and to all who watched over me and returned me home safe and sound. At the time, she did not realize that I did not come home safe and sound. In fact, I did not come home at all. She had no idea that her son had died in Lebanon and that she was now embracing an empty shell." Making this film was in many ways his casting out of the demons that had been living in him.

The film is a very visceral experience. The entire film takes place inside the tank. Even when we see what is happening outside, we only see it through the crosshairs of the gunner's periscope/gunsight. The only things we know about what is going on are what we see through the gunsight or hear over the radio. As such, the audience learns things at the same time as the tank crew. We are, in effect, a part of that crew, experiencing things just as they do.

Because they have never been in battle before, they really don't know what to expect. The gunner, who freezes the first time he's called on to act, explains that before he has only shot at barrels. When it comes to actually shooting at people, it is just too much for him—and the consequences of that failure are inescapable.

From time to time the paratrooper commander comes into the tank to confer, and it becomes very apparent that this crew does not have the military discipline that it is expected to have. Indeed, they often bicker among themselves. When the tank commander tells one of them to stand watch while the others sleep, there is an ongoing discussion of who should be standing guard. Until this time, their army experience has been just meeting their requirement of service. Now it has taken on a whole new meaning and they obviously are not ready.

The cinematography of Lebanon is exceptional. The shots inside the tank make us feel claustrophobic, even watching in a fairly empty theater. Even more impressive are the scenes of war that we see looking through the gunsight. There is devastation, bodies (some alive, some dead), events that are incomprehensible outside of a setting of war. Some of those images seem to burn themselves into one's mind: a wounded donkey, the disgust in the eyes of a survivor, a poster of Madonna and child amidst the ruins of a building, or the disorientation of a young mother who has just seen her daughter killed by the soldiers.

I'm sure that such sights have burned themselves into the minds of soldiers of every nation, as they did in Maoz's psyche. It may not be possible to remove those images, but in Lebanon those images help us all to understand a bit more of just how devastating war is to those who fight it and to those who get stuck in the middle.