Restrepo, the Oscar-nominated documentary directed by American journalist Sebastian Junger and the late British photojournalist Tim Hetherington, plays on that theme with stunning lucidity. Junger and Hetherington both spent May 2007 to July 2008 embedded with the men of 2nd Platoon, Battle Company in the deadly Korengal Valley of northeast Afghanistan.

Restrepo is not a film about war—it is war. The moments captured on camera are only a fraction of all the conflict in the world, and just a snippet of America’s ongoing struggle, but for 93 minutes it is all that matters. The images are plain and unadorned—the shaky camera is not for effect; the loss of sound is not an aesthetic choice; the tracers streaking through the gathering dusk are not the addition of a post-production supervisor.

To give the film some narrative structure, interviews are interspersed between the action on the ground. Sometimes the interviews heighten the film’s tension by foreshadowing future dangers; other times they serve to juxtapose the soldiers’ actual experiences with their reflections after returning from the front lines. Wisely, the film circumvents politics and offers no ideological judgments—it offers only pictures and words and leaves the audience with the hard work of reconciling what we see in the film with the rhetoric on the news.

As Junger said in a Vanity Fair interview, “It’s a completely apolitical film. We wanted to give viewers the experience of being in combat with soldiers, and so our cameras never leave their side. There are no interviews with generals; there is no moral or political analysis. It is a purely experiential film.”

Indeed, the film shows the soldiers at their most natural, capturing the way they talk, the way they tease each other, their homoerotic jokes, and their unwitting condescension toward the Afghans they are purportedly there to help. (At one point an exasperated Captain Kearney, responding to locals’ complaints that the Americans have detained a possible terror suspect, retorts, “You’re not understanding that I don’t fucking care.” His response is duly translated.) In this way the film explains more than a million White House press conferences and Reuters dispatches. It puts a face to the colored swaths on a map, to the places and names thrown around in the news. It shows how easily distrust, contempt, and hatred are bred of misunderstandings and good intentions.

Though Restrepo never sets out to make any judgments, by showing us the amorphous and unconventional nature of this war on terror, it becomes emblematic of America’s decade-long struggle against an enemy that rarely materializes. In fact, in the film we do not see a single enemy combatant; but that doesn’t mean they aren’t around. For all the soldiers know, the enemy could be one of the villagers they try to placate, or the suspicious man sneaking out of a house. When firefights do happen, the soldiers are beset by invisible enemies; but most of the time, they are firing blindly or looking through scopes at nothing but the expanse of craggy mountains. In one scene, the only clue that the soldiers have killed their target is the lack of gunfire.

After seeing this film, it is no wonder why this war has lasted ten years. Though the film captures a very specific war in a very specific time, the struggles of the enlisted men are timeless. Even after thousands of years, conquest is still measured by inches, and paid for with individual lives.

While watching the soldiers fight to establish a forward operating base, have cautious conversations with the locals, and tussle with each other in the barracks, I found myself comparing Restrepo to The Hurt Locker. The two films share many similarities and themes, though one was inspired by real life and the other, well, is real life. But the question I found myself asking was, did The Hurt Locker look like real life, or did real life look like The Hurt Locker?

Today’s war films go for a kind of gritty realism, abandoning the detached perspective of 80s (Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket) and the well-choreographed violence of the 90s (Saving Private Ryan, Enemy at the Gates, Black Hawk Down), for a kind of adrenaline-fueled immediacy. In today’s films, the camera is constantly shaking; the staccato pop of bullets ever-present; and the yellow hue of the picture indicative of the unyielding heat and ubiquitous sand of the Levant.

Even the parts of Restrepo not filmed in situ evoked other cinematic experiences. The interviews that presage events to come reminded me of those used to devastating effect in District 9. Captain Kearney’s exhortation to his troops after the deaths of several soldiers in a sister company—“Go out there and make the individuals that did this to us fucking pay.”—was reminiscent of a third-act speech in an alien invasion movie.

During the credits of Restrepo I wondered why I had compared it to so many fictional movies. Oscar Wilde wrote, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life,” but shouldn’t it really be the other way around?

I thought realism in war movies was meant to make viewers engage more honestly with violence and the horrors of war. But here I was watching real war and real death and trying to make sense of it, rationalize it, though the lens of cinematic fiction. Watching Restrepo after an education in war from movies and video games like Call of Duty, I had to wonder: by collapsing the gap between reality and realistic violence, had filmmakers succeeded in making movies more realistic or in making reality less so?

[We] call upon game producers to consequently and creatively incorporate rules of international humanitarian law and human rights into their games.

- BBC News

Two Swiss human rights organizations have slammed a series of war-related strategy and FPS games for permitting violence against civilians, including torture and massacres. They added that those who “violate international humanitarian law end up as war criminals, not as winners.” I think Pol Pot and Stalin may beg to differ, but political semantics aside, the point of computer games is to simulate reality in an entertaining format.

In real war, atrocities are carried out by belligerents upon civilians and soldiery alike, with little regard for the rule of law or the Geneva Conventions. Punishment, if it comes at all, is forced on the losers by the victors, whose own troops are, in victory, largely absolved of any responsibility for crimes committed in the line of duty. In my view, the inclusion of civilian targets in war games forces a moral decision on the player to choose between indiscriminate total war and a restrained, humanitarian approach. This decision is the player’s to make—psychos may want to gun babies down, but most of us abhor the idea and go to great lengths to protect civilians in games that feature them. Games with intriguing “moral arcs” such as BioShock and Half-Life dish out later punishments for ruthlessness (though they may reward it early on) and provide both replay value and allow players to experience guilt and become morally conflicted about their actions.

Typically, outside observers unaccustomed to computer games and their mores feel at liberty to comment on their content, in the same way that Southern baptists slam Harry Potter books for encouraging Satanism without taking the time to read, or even research their plotlines and characters. Preposterous arguments for Mao-style censorship are somehow granted legitimacy by being preceded with the idiot’s coverall disclaimer, “Speaking as a mother/priest/Presbyterian/humanitarian aid worker.” I’m with Trey Parker and Matt Stone—either it’s all acceptable, or none of it is. There are no, and can be no half-measures or compromises when it comes to freedom of speech.

Far be it from me to deny peoples’ opinions, but I also retain sufficient critical faculties (and a fundamental human right) to dismiss viewpoints which are founded on a lack of understanding and a vested interest in garnering publicity and provoking a “reaction.” I similarly disregard computer games as computer games, and while they have influenced my behavior in the past by making me a social recluse in my teenage years, they’ve never induced me to shoot coworkers or commuters in the face with an AK-47, no matter how tired or cranky I am. Researchers, even those invested in their findings, have failed to come up with a link between entertainment and violence—while the connection between religious and political education and violence is well documented, yet censorship has thus far failed to extend into our churches, mosques or sitting rooms. Compared to these vast institutions, the gaming industry is very, very small potatoes.

I applaud the work of humanitarian agencies, and would have no qualms about sending them to deal with any of the current hideous genocides and systemic oppressions going on around the world. But for opinions on the merits of computer gaming, I’ll ask computer gamers, not Amnesty International.