Defying Traditional War Movies

The recent World War II drama film "Defiance" does an unusually excellent job at conveying some of the "Truths" of war discussed by Tim O'Brien in "The Things They Carried". O'Brien, a proponent of telling true stories,  provides generalized criteria for both true and untrue war stories without the book. The criteria that I will be discussing is the following;

"You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity you don't care for the truth."(66)

Defiance wholeheartedly fulfills this requirement of a true war story. In Defiance, the dichotomy of beauty and obscenity is often a blurred line, in some cases the obscenity of it all becoming the true beauty of the story. One of the more striking examples of embarrassment or obscenity in the story is when one of the three protagonists (Spoiler Alert) murders in cold blood a woman and her two young boys. There are a plethora of events like these that lead the viewer to question the morality and "goodness" of the protagonists, something rare in typical "hero" type war movies, where the line between good and bad is clearly separated. I found this an extremely entertaining film to watch, and would strongly suggest it.