This movie opens a tiny window into the suffering throughout the world now.

Rating: 10/10 (22 November 2007)

If anything, this movie is more powerful than Schindler's List and All Quiet on the Western Front. It personalizes the trauma war brings by concentrating on one main character, a boy who plays war with his buddies and then suddenly finds himself thrown into the maelstrom of War playing him. It shows us how war traumatizes us, then hardens and changes us until cruelty becomes our own means of surviving. And germinates those first seeds of anger which reside in all of us.
So this film is both timeless and universal. Like the child soldiers in Africa and other countries, like those children who even now are being raised on a diet of hate and propaganda. We are reminded here that war is horror, that the innocent usually always pay more heavily than the guilty, and without unavoidable provocation should always be seen as a last resort.
It should also remind us that over 600,000 Iraqis have been killed in a war America instigated, based on lies. It's way past time that those in the administration who caused this abominable tragedy be brought to task for causing the death and suffering of both our young soldiers caught in the crossfire,and the indiscriminate killing of the innocents who live and die there now.