| Although I was already familiar with the work of Amos Gitai, who is probably the most overrated filmmaker in Israel--and one of the most mindlessly left-wing as well--I was still shocked by the treatment the director of this film gives his audience. The Israelis have produced some of the best films about war ever made(e.g., "Avanti Popolo," "Matzgor," "One of Us"), but this is the only Israeli product I've seen that promises to give the viewer a taste of the reality of war and then fails to deliver. Truly great films have been made on extremely low budgets but this isn't one of them. The director's cheap tactic in repeating stills over and over just to extend the time of a movie already too long is inexcusable. And come on, how do you make an anti-war film about those three weeks in October 1973? Anyone hoping to see an exigesis of the political and military thinking involving this two-front war will be bitterly disappointed. They should turn their attention instead to the book "The Yom Kippur War," by Rabinovich which contains a lot of recently declassified material. |