Kippur (2000)

Slow and a bit odd

The movie takes place during the Yom Kippur war of 1973. However, it really isn't about the war itself so don't expect to learn much about it. That was the first bit of disappointment for me. Rather the movie is a personal account of two reservists who are trying to catch up to their unit and end up on a helicopter crew collecting wounded soldiers. So it about their experience of war, the emotions they get caught up in and the lived of people they encounter in the process.

The movie pretty slow and somewhat boring. It takes a while for the plot to start developing and there are long shots of just gazing and watching. I suppose if I expected the movie to have this focus rather than being about the Yom Kippur war itself, then I may not view it this way. But I kept waiting to see an encounter with the Syrians and it never came.

The movie is framed with a bizarre opening and closing scene of love making, which really does not have much to do with the movie. I suppose it was meant to be an artistic expression of a life in Israel -- where the surreal and ordinary goes hand in hand. Where one leaves a peaceful home, goes to war and returns back as if nothing had happened. October 9, 2008

One of the worst war movies of all times

This movies is lacking any form of plot or story line, it is also stretched unnecessarily. Gitai obviously created this movie for propaganda purposes. Basically the same scenes appear over an over again just in different settings. I had expect, being a veteran of that war, that he would be able to translate the pain and suffering of the reservists into the concept of the movie but the failed terribly.
The fact that amazed me the most is the lack detail. The injured soldiers mostly are completely unresponsive if they are not vital to the hardly existing story and for some reason none of them (the ones in the field) have any physical injuries visible.
Probably the only more disappointing aspect of this movie, aside from the directing, is the acting of the main characters. Not convincing and often very amateurish.
Overall, if this movie is not 99 cents, don't waste your money. April 3, 2008

I never knew there was a boring war movie, but Gitai did it

I was looking forward to an interesting movie about the Yom Kippur war, and I mean interesting and not necessarily a thriller with lots of blood. This movie managed to be utterly boring. There is no story line, no climax, you learn nothing about the Yom Kippur war, its context or anything relating to it, and not really anything about the characters either. The shots are endless, especially of the same tracks and the same tanks again and again and the same injured soldiers. The only thing I learned was that a lot of stretchers were used during the war. The content of this movie was just about enough for a short film, especially if you take out the long sex scenes in the beginning and end, which were apparently only there to add time and to maybe wake you up at the end. Somehow Gitai seems to have thought an art movie means an utterly pretentious, boring movie. What an utter disappointment! June 28, 2006

Dreamlike art house war movie

"Kippur" is not your typical war movie. There are no heroes - just two reservists who get swept up in the backwash of the 1973 Yom Kippur war while looking for their already mobilized and departed unit. It is like one of those nightmares where you know you have to be somewhere to take an exam/go to an interview/go to work, and somehow, you just can't get there.

Kippur tells us almost nothing about the details of the 1973 campaign (which Israel, surprised, came fairly close to losing, since it is really after conveying the sheer randomness and chaos of war from the worm's eye point of view. Unlike our modern Iraq adventures, it is likely the average grunt knew very little about what was happening in the next town or valley, or whether the war was being own or lost. The persepctive was interesting to someone raised with the media-enhanced viewpoint, after the 1967 war, that the Israeli military ran like a Swiss watch. In "Kippur", we learn that like our own army mired in Iraq, these are just weekend soldiers trying to get by.

This is a European-flavoured film, so it is bookended by equally dreamlike sex scenes ("Thin Red Line" tried this in a tamer way) which makes the movies' R-rating well deserved. May 18, 2004

When good intentions end in tragedy

This is a powerful film. There are no other epithets that describe it. Gitai is able to draw us into teh conflict from the very first shots that capture the desolation of three long refugee camps along a deserted road. The excellent photography of Renato Berta is very effective and matches the director's intent. The realism of war is interpreted in all its crudeness and, at the same time, with desperate humanity. The story leaves no space to memory and focuses on human suffering, the rescue operations and the aid provided to the wounded. The article also poses the question as to what constitutes moral cinema. The answer, is suggested, is the film "Kippur". The realism of the screenplay renders with uncanny clarity the horror and the absurdity of any war. This point of view, Amos Gitai's point of view is valid well beyond the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Gitai does not blame one or the other side, but he takes the audience at the epicenter of the chaos that is a war against men - regardless of colour, nation or creed January 25, 2004

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