Sand Castle (2017)

An engaging, gripping fact-based drama starring Nicholas Hoult (Mad Max: Fury Road) as a young machine gunner in the U.S. Marines whose platoon is put in the impossible position of saving an Iraqi village.

Offers too little to the War is Hell genre to be noteworthy.

It's that paradigm shift of war in the buzzing age of mass media: There is literally nothing more horrific than war, and yet nothing seems to become overfamiliar more quickly through modern media saturation.

Sand Castle does a respectable job of depicting a wretched conflict that none of its participants wanted, but its reason for being feels a little built on sand.

Straightforward, but its authenticity is unquestionable.

There's a good chance you might forget Sand Castle exists moments after watching it, much like how the world seems to have forgotten the massive scandal that the Iraq War was, now that every day basically begins with a chance of it ending in nuclear war.

Gut-rot emotions are plentiful and powerful, but "Sand Castle" is best with the details of the day, grasping the nightmare of control that is Iraq, which inspires true fear in those tasked with implementing change.

Sand Castle isn't exactly a modern classic in the tradition of Platoon, but it feels authentic in a way that I suspect those touched by war will find cathartic and comforting.

Sand Castle is an Iraq war story about certain futility, but there's a certain redundancy to political overtones that preach what we've been hearing all along.

SAND CASTLE is another Netflix movie that doesn't really feel like a movie

An Iraq War combat picture that fails to surprise, generic in the extreme.

Unwittingly perhaps, Sand Castle reveals itself as a microcosm of America's foreign policy in the Middle East.