Starring Yoav Donat, Oshri Cohen, and Itay Tiran. In English, Hebrew, Arabic, and French with English subtitles. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, August 27, at the Ridge Theatre

Ever since Fabrice del Dongo experienced the Battle of Waterloo as a brawl with a couple of strangers in the French novel The Charterhouse of Parma, artists have been following in Stendhal’s footsteps by dropping their heroes into a combat fog of fear, ignorance, and confusion.

All of these elements are very much present in Lebanon, a deliberately claustrophobic film about an Israeli tank crew’s first day in hostile territory. It’s June 1982, and the Israel Defense Forces have just crossed the border with Lebanon. No one really knows what’s going on, and visibility is mostly limited to the turret and slits of the armoured vehicle the film’s main characters are riding in. This is because writer-director Samuel Maoz wanted to make a subjective-camera war movie along the lines of 84 Charlie MoPic, while making the tank as much of a protagonist in this partly autobiographical narrative as the submarine was in Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot. Technically, the film works really well. By the final reel, you can practically smell the fuel oil, while your nerves have you itching to get out.

On the narrative and political planes, the results are less impressive. While Maoz makes it painfully clear how much ordinary Lebanese suffered from these events, and although he seems to have more respect for Israel’s (permanent) adversaries than he does for its (temporary) allies, his ideological position remains unclear. As for the drama, the tensions between the various crew members are pretty standard, while the combat scenes are hampered as much as they’re helped by the formal limitations the director placed on his camera.

Nevertheless, on balance, this is a pretty good war flick. Better yet, it seems designed to cool Middle Eastern hostilities, not inflame them.