Pushing the war onto the screen

"The character I play is kind of like me," says the 24-year-old actor, a Philadelphia native who now lives in Sherman Oaks. "He's a good Marine. But he watches his friend die and he just loses it. He kills a bunch of people."

With little fanfare, Hollywood has begun chronicling and critiquing the Iraq war even before it has ended.

"Haditha" is among several upcoming films about the conflict. The most high-profile and conventional is "No True Glory: The Battle for Fallujah," set for a 2008 release and starring Harrison Ford as the general leading the 2004 charge into the western city controlled by insurgents. "Glory," which is still in pre-production, resembles the straightforward tales of heroism Hollywood turned out during World War II.

But almost all the other upcoming projects reflect the zeitgeist of a nation increasingly opposed to a conflict that has already cost tens of thousands of lives and shows no signs of abating.

One, director Kimberly Peirce's "Stop Loss," stars Ryan Phillippe as an Iraq veteran who refuses to return to the country when ordered to do so. A project in the works for 2009 is "Sweet Relief," starring Kirsten Dunst as Marla Ruzicka, the American aid worker killed in a suicide car-bomb blast near the Baghdad airport in 2005.

"Haditha," directed by Nick Broomfield, assembles a cast that includes former U.S. Marines and Iraqi refugees to seek clarity and revelation in the murky struggle between insurgents and Americans unfolding regularly on the streets and dirt roads of Iraq. In it, an angry but honorable Iraqi man is driven to revenge and joins an insurgency against an occupying army. Frightened villagers let him plant a bomb targeting a passing military convoy. An exemplary soldier, infuriated by the death of a cherished comrade, opens fire on the villagers, killing innocents.

"Each side has its point of view," Broomfield, a sedate, silver-haired Brit, said during a break in filming here recently. "They completely believe in their point of view. Both sides are very extreme and very destructive. Sympathetic and sensitive people get swept into this situation by forces that are bigger than them."

Unlike "The Deer Hunter," "Apocalypse Now" and "Platoon," which examined the moral ambiguities of the Vietnam War several years after it had concluded, Broomfield's film and the others aren't waiting for the last troops to come home. Cultural critics say these new movies show both the unpopularity of the Iraq war and the sophistication of filmmakers who understand the power of war movies.

Feature films play a crucial role in piercing through the consciousness of Americans emotionally desensitized to daily images of violence, said Michael Tucker, co-director of the Iraq war documentary "Gunner Palace." "To make the war real, it has to be fictionalized or worse, even sensationalized," he said.

Filmmaker Deborah Scranton, director of "The War Tapes," a documentary made from footage shot by National Guardsmen serving in Iraq, also worked to make the war feel more real to Americans. "The war isn't on TV every night," she said. "There are snippets that are on -- you don't really get inside and have a context. With film, you try to place it in context."

"Haditha," though, is among the only projects in the pipeline that strives to paint as vivid a picture of Iraqi life as that of the Americans caught up in the war. Using amateur actors with real-life experiences in Iraq, the film evokes the spirit and themes of the 1966 film "The Battle of Algiers." And like that movie, which was banned from French and British movie screens until 1971, Broomfield's film has already proved controversial. Every Hollywood door he knocked at, he was told it was too soon for such a movie.

"Everyone's so worried," said Broomfield, best known for his documentaries about serial killer Aileen Wuornos and rocker Kurt Cobain. "They all wondered, 'Does the American public have an appetite for this?' "

While that remains to be seen, some observers detect more hunger for movies about this war than past conflicts.