A scene from Samuel Maoz's film Lebanon. (Maple Pictures)

Israeli director Samuel Maoz made his visceral and provocative new film, Lebanon, because he was tormented by the smell of burning flesh from his time as a 20-year-old tank gunner during the 1982 Israel-Lebanon war.

Director Samuel Maoz was an Israeli soldier in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, a conflict many view as Israel's Vietnam.

When Maoz watched the events of the Second Lebanon War unfold in 2006, he felt it was time to speak out: “My prime reason for writing the script was a need to unload, to nakedly expose the world of war as it is, without the heroic clichés,'' he told Cineaste magazine a few months after picking up the Golden Lion, the Venice Film Festival's top prize, for Lebanon.

In the last decade, former members of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have produced acclaimed films that explore the emotional trauma of the country's conflicts with its Arab neighbours: there’s Amos Gitai's Kippur (2000), Joseph Cedar’s Beaufort (2007) and, most recently, Ari Folman’s award-winning animated documentary film, Waltz with Bashir (2008).

Like Maoz, Folman was an Israeli soldier in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, a conflict between the Israeli army and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), with Syrian and Lebanese forces also playing key roles. Many view this war as Israel's Vietnam, because it spurred a major public protest, breaking the national consensus behind previous wars.

The Israeli public's outrage was largely due to the massacre of hundreds of Palestinian refugees by Christian Phalangists in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, while Israeli forces apparently stood by. Ariel Sharon, Israeli defence minister at the time, was later condemned for allowing the massacre to happen. An Israeli state commission of inquiry later found that Sharon bore "personal responsibility" for not having foreseen that the Phalangists would commit the slaughter. He was forced to give up the defence portfolio but was elected prime minister in 2001 and re-elected in 2003.

Waltz with Bashir follows a former infantry soldier who suddenly has a vision from the night of the Sabra and Shatila Massacre. At the start of the film, Folman is muddled and begins to speak to his fellow soldiers in an effort to recall what happened in 1982. His moral confusion and the guilt he feels about his role in the massacre sets the tone for this melancholic, complex film.

A scene from the film Waltz with Bashir. (TIFF)

While Folman's dreamy animation shelters us from the violence of war, Maoz thrusts us into battle. Except for the opening and closing shots, the entire film takes place inside an Israeli tank holding four very young, largely incompetent soldiers. On the first day of the war, this panic-stricken crew is sent into a town to flush out Palestinian fighters. When anxious gunner Shmulik (Yoav Donat) – loosely based on Maoz himself – is ordered to fire, he can't. The result is that an Israeli soldier is killed. Shmulik also fails to shoot a Syrian soldier firing a rocket at the tank. The hit almost destroys the lurching beast.

Maoz's combatants plow through Lebanon, a land that is completely foreign to them (none of them speak Arabic). The soldiers, and the audience, only see the impact of the tank's rampage through its viewfinder, which makes an ominous, droning click each time it changes targets. Through it, we witness a rape, watch a naked woman search the rubble for her dead daughter and see a man get his limbs blown off.

Framing the destruction through a circle marked with crosshairs is an effective dramatic device. It highlights how war machines – and combat itself – make killing easier by distancing soldiers from their prey. But the narrow view of the outside world also reflects how disoriented this squad is. Its members can barely keep order inside the claustrophobic, broken-down tank and know nothing of the larger war plan they are participating in. Maoz demonstrates how ridiculous and utterly despairing war is.

Samuel Maoz, the Israeli director behind the film Lebanon. (Maple Pictures)

The four young soldiers trapped in the tank are not skilled, dedicated soldiers of Zionism. They are well-fed, cherub-cheeked boys. They speak Hebrew, but act very much like middle-class North Americans and are utterly unprepared for what is happening. One misses his mother desperately. Another is afraid he will disappoint his father by not performing in a professional manner. None of them appear to care about the politics of the invasion. What they do is bicker, tell jokes, talk about sex and complain about the stifling heat. Their goals are not to kill the enemy or expand the borders of Israel, but more immediate: to have a pee and eventually go home.

Unfortunately, Maoz seems unable to avoid the clichés of many American war films. The tank's highly charged atmosphere provides a constant adrenalin hit, and his soldiers are portrayed as good, harmless boys thrust into a situation beyond their control. Maoz is a gifted director, but his film avoids two important issues: the political context and the moral responsibility of soldiers who have orders to kill.

Waltz with Bashir went further because it attempted to explore the moral dilemma of being a soldier. Folman insisted that the Israeli Defence Ministry allowed the Sabra and Shatila massacre to happen, and by extension, so did he and his fellow soldiers.

Lebanon is engaging, intensely dramatic and clearly antiwar. But by not providing more political context to the human drama inside the tank, the film, like the viewfinder through which the soldiers see the outside world, is too narrow in scope.

Lebanon opens across Canada on Aug. 27.

Patricia Bailey is a writer based in Montreal.