"And we get off on various visions of carnage," Swofford wrote early in the book. "Deceit, the raping and killing and pillaging.  We concentrate on Vietnam films because it's the most recent war, and the successes and failures of that war help write our training manuals. We rewind and review various scenes, such as Robert Duvall riding in gunships and Martin Sheen floating up the fake Vietnamese Congo. Willem Defoe shot by a friendly and left on the battlefield in Platoon, and Matthew Modine talk trash to a streetwalker in Full Metal Jacket." Even the most anti- of anti-war films, he says, rouse the jarheads, make them yell Semper Fi, help them to get off. This is portrayed memorable in a scene where the jarheads watch Apocalypse Now, rousing themselves into an orgiastic frenzy, singing to Ride of the Valkyries when the helicopters arrive (which for some reason called to mind Gremlins titular critters deliriously watching Snow White in a movie theater, singing along to "Heigh Ho," but I digress.)

But when their moment in the sun comes - as in one of the film's most disturbing scenes, when Swofford's bloodthirsty sniper cohort Troy (Peter Sarsgaard is terrific as always, adding depth with a hint of the anger bubbling just under the surface; his character is a bit underdeveloped as written but he brings to it what he can) has a conniption fit when told that they won't be allowed to carry out their mission to fire on Iraqi officers in a tower across from them. Instead, as with most of that war, the attack will happen with a quick strike from the air.

The irony of the first Gulf War for these soldiers is that while they were anticipating, even thirsty for, a war like they'd known from the Vietnam War movies they'd watched, they're instead not only sentenced to the eternal sand of the desert rather than the exotic jungles of Asia, but given a war that was co-opted by television, while being fought primarily from the air like a video game.  In fact, in addition to the numerous home video games that echo the experience of flying in battle and carpet bombing remotely, there was at least one coin-op game ironically, or presciently, called Gulf War II which came out the same year as the first war. While ultrarealistic video games like Full Spectrum Warrior, which is set in the Middle East and is based on an actual Army training simulation, debatably could contribute to the desensitizing of soldiers to the inhumanity of killing.

The depiction of war in the gulf, however apolitical Jarhead is, can't help but stir up comparisons between it and the current incarnation, the sequel, which has dragged on for two years and counting (and 2,000 US casualties and counting), serving up a stark contrast with the air of detachment experienced the first time around. In fact, as Naomi Klein noted after September 11, 2001, "Watching the coverage this week was a stark contrast to the last time I sat glued to a television set watching a real-time war on CNN. The Space Invader battlefield of the Persian Gulf war had almost nothing in common with the destruction of Manhattan. Back then, we saw only sterile bomb's-eye views of concrete targets - there, and then gone. Who was in those abstract polygons? We never found out."[1]

The most impressive, and properly jarring, sequence in the film involves a long passage when the men in Swofford's platoon enter the blackened landscape of a just-bombed desert, littered with the charred remains of Iraqis who'd attempted to flee before being bombed. This segues into the extremely well-recreated oil fires scenes which probably still don't capture the awfulness of being amidst it in reality (or as well as Werner Herzog's haunting Lessons of Darkness) but is nonetheless supremely well done. The image of a horse that crosses Swofford's path is particularly haunting, as it appears through the smoke, dripping, coated with oil, drooling from dehydration or slow suffocation. This is director Sam Mendes' finest moment.

And yet, as well crafted and provocative as the film is, it isn't as emotionally engaging as it should be. Scenes dwelling on the way the men worry and deal with thoughts (sometimes paranoid, sometimes for good reason) of their loved ones back home cheating on them don't connect; perhaps it's because we've seen this so many times, just a modern twist on the Dear John worry. In one scene, a homemade porn videotape is sent maliciously to one unsuspecting soldier as revenge for cheating from his wife. For Swofford and the other marines, the tape becomes simply a porn movie, something to get off on after the poor sap leaves the room. These moments and others that should be poignant, including the scene where Sarsgaard's Troy goes ballistic and the revelation at the conclusion of his character's fate, curiously fall flat. Again, this could be a reflection on our own expectations for these types of scenes in war films past, a subversion that we may not connect with psychologically but can appreciate on some meta level. Still, a movie should move us and this one often doesn't. But as with Swofford's book, the movie's rarely sentimental, too. Where it ultimately fits in the war movie pantheon is up for debate, but Mendes' film does capture the book's, and that war's, feeling of pointlessness.

While Jarhead recreated the Middle East in the safer climes of the Southern California desert, Hany Abu-Assad's Paradise Now was filmed right in the heart of the matter, engendering about as much danger behind the cameras as depicted in front of them. It was shot on location in Nablus, Nazareth and Tel Aviv. Abu-Assad said in the press notes that "it was kind of insane to shoot a film [in Nablus]. Every day we had some sort of trouble." Some Palestinians worried the film was anti-Palestinian; others supported it as in favor of their quest for freedom and democracy. One group specifically thought the film was not presenting the suicide bombers positively and asked them to stop filming. They had to stop filming, in fact, every day of the shoot, and it's a miracle for them and us that the final product was made at all, yet alone turned into one of the year's more memorable films, with the daily real-life dangers around the making of the film only heighten the tension felt on screen.

Paradise Now is similar to Jarhead in that its politics are ambiguous, if it can be considered political at all. In fact, it's a terrific film that's all the more so for its contradictions. The two men chosen for a suicide bombing mission, Said and Khaled, friends and mechanics at a Nablus auto yard, only find out about their task a day before. They have only that much time to spend with their loved ones without letting on, while also quickly learning of the details of their task. These men are not looking for blood, they are looking for spiritual redemption, and while one cannot fully understand their actions, there is enough background given - the anger they feel about the Israeli occupation, and the fear of being called traitors, or of dying in humliation - but the film passes no judgment on it, rather, it focuses on the enormous amount of tension intrinsic to the plot. The film leaves one with a queasy feeling, like the after affects of a punch in the stomach, almost from the get go.

The men are cleaned up for their final martyrdom - after main character Saïd, one of the selected suicide bombers, gets a shave and a haircut, and looks radically different (and actor Kais Nashif looks more like Liev Schreiber), strapped down with bombs, which are duct-taped tightly to their torsos, and then dressed in suits so that they can pretend to be coming into Israel for a wedding.

For awhile Said puts on a brave front, you don't know what he's thinking except for subtle hints that he may be having second thoughts about having volunteered for this mission (though it takes him longer to have second thoughts than it seemed to take Swofford, who quickly, we are told, realizes enlisting may have been a mistake). Finally Said asks his cohort, "Are we doing the right thing?" The film does a clever thing, by introducing the character Suha (Lubna Azabal, the Belgium-born actress so luminous in Michel Deville's Almost Peaceful), more cosmopolitan than the men, having grown up in France and Morocco. She becomes the voice of reason, or at least caution, questioning the value of suicide bombing, arguing with the suicide bombers about the validity of this as a long-term strategy. "What about the ones left behind?" she asks Said in earnest.

While the film has been praised for its realism, that may be in the eye of the beholder. David D'arcy [http://daily.greencine.com/archives/001329.html] saw it three times at three different festivals, including Haifi, Israel, where, disturbingly, the audience saw it as a comedy. But it is one of the film's strengths that it weaves in the absurd moments naturalistically; in fact, it's full of black comedy, seemingly a prerequisite for a good war film, most memorably in a scene where the suicide bombers make their own videotape (decidedly not porn) as a way to record their message one final time. The production becomes a sly comedy of errors, but it takes on different connotation later when we see how these videotapes are used.

Even if the film can't fully carry its tense premise to a completely satisfying conclusion, Paradise Now is still tremendously suspenseful and provocative viewing.

Another film that does not squarely take one side or another, in this case in the second US-Iraq war, is Bhaman Ghobadi's unforgettable Turtles Can Fly (released earlier this year, now out on DVD), in which we see a very different ripple effect, that from those slammed in the middle. Set near the Iraqi-Turkish border on the eve of an American invasion, where Kurdish refugees, many of them children, await their fate with the feeling "the world is ending."

"Look what Saddam has done to us!" one villager cries. No satellite, no TV, no way of knowing what was "really happening" in the war. (One of the boys in the film is actually nicknamed "Satellite" because he's become a broker for satellite dishes). When the town finally gets its own dish, a hundred refugees, many of them working the mine fields, come down to beg to watch the news. "We've come to see the war news," they beg. "What do the foreign channels say?" As if watching CNN, or even more absurdly, Fox News, would give them The Truth in capital letters. Coming from Saddam's world it's understandable they seek truth elsewhere. One can only feel they'll be disappointed. "There is Mr. Bush. The world is in his hands," they say while flipping channels (averting their eyes when an MTV-ish program full of scantily clad women appears). But for us it is the images of the film, almost documentary-like in its immediacy, if also lushly photographed, that seem more like the reality we were missing when this phase of the war was being beamed to our living rooms.

Particularly unforgettable are images of children deformed by mines, missing arms, dead legs - this makes the most indelible impression from any of these films. (Though even these handicaps don't keep the children from being able to fight - one armless boy headbutts Satellite, who, face bleeding, threatens back, "I'll cut off both your legs," after him, in a bit of a Monty Python-esque moment.

There was a famous photograph on the cover of National Geographic in 1985 that was one of their most requested pictures ever and became the cover of their 100 Best Pictures coffee table book. It was of a beautiful Afghani girl who was a refugee from the Soviet-Afghani war, her piercing green eyes haunting Americans who otherwise had little emotional connection to that particular conflict. What was it that struck us about her? Cynically, I often felt it was just her beauty, her eyes. But I was reminded of this by the character of Agrin, the refugee girl in Turtles with the haunting eyes, who has lost her family and was raped by Iraqi soldiers; she contemplates suicide and it's hard to blame her. While Satellite may be able to see some hope in the future, she represents the understandable lack of faith in a life worth living. What kind of a world is this anyway, when children have to disarm mines and then sell them to scrape together money? Director Ghobadi is Iranian (the film was, amazingly, an Iran-Iraq co-production), a country whose films have famously centered around children, but while those films usually get allegorical, Turtles Can Fly is more firmly entrenched in the harsh reality of the dire circumstances the children find themselves in.

It is not really fair to say that these films are apolitical, particularly not of Ghobadi's film, which is the most urgent of the three, and of Paradise Now, which may unnerve viewers precisely by not passing judgment on suicide bombers as much as helping us comprehend what previously might to us have been incomprehensible. Turtles Can Fly is decidedly not pro-Saddam, but the very end, after the Americans leave and the deformed children and wayward refugees are back fending alone, it's clear the film is only interested in humanity, in the sadness of the people, not the borders between nations. Politics doesn't always mean taking a political side. How can we take sides, these films ask. In this war, as with all others, with the stranded and bombed at ground level having never left their villages and mountainsides, except for what they have seen on television - to them, there is no politics. There is only futility, hopelessness, and death.