Gulf War vets haven't received a high-profile movie version of their experiences like the soldiers of WWII and Vietnam have. Now Jarhead is here to be that movie and to show why there probably won't be many more. It paints the war as something of an anomaly, where conflicts were so limited and swift that one would actually have to scrounge for those anti-war movie essentials like depictions of agonizing violence and senseless death. How can you make a war movie without the horrors of war?

The answer is by depicting new, updated versions of horror. In Jarhead, the greatest dangers come from boredom and anxiety, along with anticipation and misguided expectations. After being built up with what can be described as military hype, new recruits of the U.S. Marines are shipped off to a modern war that creates an experience far different from the one they were trained for. It's not war's utter destruction that shakes them up; it's the lack of this destruction that unnerves them. The testosterone levels have been whipped up into a frenzy and now there's nowhere to let it out -- even in a war.

The film emerges as a comment on the misfortunes of a transitional generation and on the shaping of its personality. Like any element of the overall human experience, war mutates through the decades, yet for most of the 20th century -- the century of the birth of mass media -- it had an underlying, culture-fueled consistency in its portrayal. War's depicted meaninglessness often went hand-in-hand with the morbid fascination of its thrills. In one disturbingly funny scene in Jarhead, the soldiers gather to watch the "Ride of the Valkyries" scene of Apocalypse Now, raucously cheering the copters as they launch their assault. The movie then moves on to observe the general weirdness of how the Gulf War becomes a letdown, and how this generation reacts with an irony-fueled bitterness and a heightened sense of displacement.

This is tricky territory because Jarhead is based on the experiences of one Marine named Anthony Swofford (played by Jake Gyllenhaal here), who wrote the book on which the movie is based. Surely Swofford's path of frustrated inactivity wasn't shared by all the soldiers of the Gulf War. And it's  also not reflective of the current situation in Iraq. Yet, the dramatization seems justifiable in how it gives light to the possibilities of these new mutations of war. And despite its differences in outward appearance, there's still a common experience to be shared -- the veteran of a war will always witness a horror the regular civilian can never fully understand, even when the horror takes the form of sitting around, waiting, wondering, and slowly losing a grip on the stability of one's fate.

Jarhead is bookended with a pronouncement from Swofford about how a soldier will always be a soldier, even after he returns to civilian life, just as long as he's had the training and has felt the reality of a war. But there's a strange, detectable resentment here to the level of his scarring -- in that he hadn't been scarred enough to feel the residual effects of the military life that he feels. It's almost as if the horror wasn't horrible enough, and yet the events that he did go through have certainly affected him. It places him in a limbo, caught between being primed and nurtured for an experience he didn't have and the awkward, directionless, unrewarding (and, perhaps, useless?) experience he did have.

Director Sam Mendes might be accused here of not being subtle enough in presenting Jarhead's themes -- a lot of what happens here is met with a pronouncement of how strange things are, and how nothing is turning out as a soldier would hope for (the use of voice-over, for instance, is evidence of this). Yet he makes up for it in the movie's feel of aimlessness and in how visually surreal it is. This is a movie about disillusioned fascination, and it looks the part with its stark desert scenes and with Gyllenhaal's glazed-over expressions. His face isn't saying war is hell -- it's saying war isn't everything it's cracked up to be.

(Released by Universal Pictures and rated "R' for pervasive language, some violent images and strong sexual content.)

Review also posted on www.windowtothemovies.com.