Whatever else you may want to say about the film version of Anthony Swofford's Gulf War memoir, Jarhead, it certainly makes for an unusual war movie -- maybe the only one in which the hero sees little in the way of combat and his platoon suffers no casualties.

For a movie that deals so boldly with the roots of our current, controversial war in Iraq, it's also surprisingly apolitical. It keeps its point of view narrow, its characters clueless and any moral reservations close to its vest.

And yet it's a powerful experience that measures the human cost of its war -- and all war, really -- less in terms of battlefield statistics than in the subtle, degenerative psychological effect that it sends rippling through a generation and a society.

Even more than the Vietnam War epics it apes -- The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now (both referenced in the movie) and Full Metal Jacket (which it structurally resembles) -- Jarhead is a "trip" movie without a traditional story line.

Its hero (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a 20-year-old piece of cannon fodder who made a "detour" to the Marine Corps on his way to college, and, in the opening sequence, finds himself in the living hell of basic training at San Diego's Marine Corps Recruit Depot.

But he survives and is assigned to Camp Pendleton, where he's trained as a sniper and almost immediately shipped out as part of Operation Desert Shield, to protect the Saudi Arabian oil fields from the ambitions of Saddam Hussein.