The Yom Kippur war almost caught Israel unawares. Twenty days later they were across the Suez 100km from Cairo and near as many from Damascus, another disaster for the Arabs. In a strange turn of events however, the surprise attack and doom-laden buildup to it, with thousands of graves dug in anticipation, had a devastating effect on the country, in effect signaling a perpetual state of fear and alert.I am in the middle of exploring through films these bumps in the national mind, which brought me here. For what it's worth, the filmmaker has decided to capture an experience of war as purely about what it means to be there as he can. He knows, he was there.Sadly, it's flat beyond belief. For better or worse I found it to be nothing like Thin Red Line, as others have mentioned in their comments. Whereas Malick spins war to be one of conflicting urges in the soul, this is what we see, two hours of med- evacs carrying the wounded.There's one contemplative image in the film, a helo shot of a muddy battlefield with maneuvering tanks drawing meaningless patterns on the mud, contrasted with the early shot of the lush mingling of painted sex evocative of life, color, imagination, spontaneity. It's a great shot, and perfectly describes both what the film wants to portray, a sort of aimless cosmos, and what it ends up with—aimless doodling on the ground.So the filmmaker reminisces in film about a time and place that allowed no skyward gaze. The important message is that war is as wasteful and pointless to happen in real life as it is to watch in this film.

While it's easy to set expectations and think that this could be a Saving Private Ryan / Black Hawk Down type of film (since the synopsis does reveal a chopper going down), this is after all an Amos Gitai film, and I feel this is more Apocalypse Now with The Thin Red Line sensibilities, though with none of Terence Mallick's visual poetry.Based on Gitai's own experience of joining a helicopter rescue crew during the war of Kippur in 1967, he creates the character of Sergeant Weinraub (Liron Levo, also seen in Disengagement) and it's through his eyes that the story unfolds. The film is curiously bookend by some graphic, artistic (literally, since it involves an incredibly huge canvas and lots of paint) sex, where Weinraub pounds his girlfriend in an extended scene in the beginning, before the outbreak of war with the attack by Egypt and Syria interrupting his moment of passion, and he picks up friend and officer Lt Ruso (Tomer Russo) as they drive back to camp to join their unit.Along the way they meet a number of characters who flit into and out of the story, and soon find themselves in a camp that they could get to, and volunteering to join a makeshift, hastily assembled helicopter unit to fly to the warzone in order to pick up wounded survivors, kind of like a flying ambulance tasked for rescue missions. We learn a thing or two about emergency evacuations, as well as the policy of not transporting the dead in time-critical missions as these, taking only survivors and sticking to their mission objectives.If one does not know that Gitai is at the helm of the film, one could expect an out-and-out war movie, since the scenario painted provides plenty of avenue for such. There are flights into the frontline, and in carrying out their mission, Getai litters the screen with plenty of dismembered bodies up close enough to churn your stomach. There are moments where some action is called for, but these are few and far between since our soldiers are unarmed. For those with Gitai sensibilities, then you'll probably note his preference for long takes, and there was one incredibly long sequence involving a traffic jam and narrow roads, when Weinraub and Ruso are rushing back en route to their camp. Otherwise, most of the shots during war involve tight helicopter interiors, or helicopter overhead views, but through narrow windows, capturing scores of tanks in vast, muddy landscapes ravaged by tracks that had gone past, that you can imagine the scale of the invasion with.Unlike other war films that preach the negative aspects of war, this felt more of a documentary of sorts, since after all it's based upon the director's own experience. Scenes are delivered as a matter-of-fact, sometimes devoid of emotion too as the soldiers go about doing the business, and the plenty of landscape shots are just that and could easily have been representative of news reels back then. Not your conventional war movie, and definitely worthwhile only when the troops hit the ground, and not flying high and far away from the action.

This film offers more of an artistic view of warfare on a level that one normally does not see; even though the dialog in the film is small, and even though what dialog there is does not focus on the main, overriding theme of the vile nature of war the point is still clearly conveyed by the director's use of his actors and the camera. Overall, the film could have been much shorter; it was seemingly dragged out at times, and sometimes it seemed downright tiring to watch. However, some of the shots throughout the film were very good, and the story at times can be interesting. But when all is said and done, this is not a very high quality film due to its' unnecessary length and often overly artistic portrayal. The few moments of good cinema in here do not make the whole thing worth watching.

This movie doesn't provide much of a context for understanding either the war itself, nor the characters it follows. Characterization should be key in a piece like this, which dwells more on the (in)humanity of war than the action, but Kippur features a level of character development that wouldn't pass muster in a low-grade action flick: you're essentially following around a chopper full of ciphers as they pick up dead and wounded and suffer nervous breakdowns along the way.