June, 1982 - The First Lebanon War. A lone tank and a paratroopers platoon are dispatched to search a hostile town - a simple mission that turns into a nightmare. The four members of a tank crew find themselves in a violent situation that they cannot contain. Motivated by fear and the basic instinct of survival, they desperately try not to lose themselves in the chaos of war.
The emotional traumas of young Israeli soldiers drafted into the war with Lebanon in the 1980s are recounted through the eyes of a tank crew in this wrenching concentration of raw emotion directed by Samuel Maoz.
Lebanon is meticulous, nearly clinical in its attention to what happens in war -- specifically what happened in the first days of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 -- but it is also a palpably and intensely personal film.
Visceral, torn-from-the-memory filmmaking that packs every punch except one to the heart, Lebanon is the boldest and best of the recent mini-wave of Israeli pics ("Beaufort," "Waltz With Bashir") set during conflicts between the two countries.
Director Samuel Maoz's gripping you-are-there feel does for tanks what "Das Boot" did for submarines, and that chokehold only gets tighter as this taut drama about the 1982 Israeli-Lebanese war goes on.
The film's visceral assault extends to the sledgehammer script, an amassment of unsubtle ironies and war-is-hell clichés that often reduce it to an amateurish theatrical stunt.
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