Director Jopseph Cedar’s (CAMPFIRE) futility of war feature is an examination of the reactions and travails of a small group of soldiers led by 22-year old Commander Liraz (Oshri Cohen) stationed at BEAUFORT.  This mountain fortress was captured by the Israelis in 1982 and dates back to the time of the Crusades.  The film begins with the fort’s defence and evacuation following higher orders.

Cedar takes his viewer for a look from the newly arrived bomb disposal expert Ziv’s (Ohad Knoller) point of view.  As the newbie arrives, the viewer is given information as he is (given) by Commander Liraz.  Through this, Cedar gets to relay his message.  Cedar is fond of night scenes though it is often hard to see what happens in quite a few of the shot scenes as he alternates the darkness and light.  The claustrophobia of living within the confines of the castle and tedium of the soldiers’ daily routines are well demonstrated.  But the trouble is that though the film is about the fight between Lebanon and Israel, audiences have experienced similar themes in countless other war films.  There is the familiar ranting of the soldiers about their girlfriends, family and childhood to show that the men are really kids at heart and non-fighters.  The talk about the new sleeping bags, great cooked meal and permission to shower minutes before a mission to emphasize the futility of war is a bit too manipulative, not to say obvious.  Cedar injects a bit of tension into the proceedings with a segment involving a soldier testing for mines in a field.  He gets blown up.  But anyone trained in bomb disposal knows how the procedure is safe so long as one carefully goes about it following all the rules in the book.  (I know as I was conscripted in the army and have undergone a few lessons on explosives.) This device of using explosives to keep the audience at the edge of the seat is a favourite tactic used by directors (Henri-Goerges Clouzot’s famous truck carrying explosives traveling a rough rocky track in THE WAGES OF FEAR and the cutting of the red or blue wire in Richard Lester’s JUGGERNAUT).

BEAUFORT is an earnest, well-intentioned anti-war film that gets its message across.  Trouble is that the lack of a storyline and background of the soldiers lead to a rather tedious (film runs over 2 hours) message film.  BEAUFORT (Good Fort), which is based on a novel by Ron Leshem who also wrote the script, also won an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film.