The movie "War", a masterpiece of Russian cinematography, is centred around a dual metaphore: the English verb "to shoot", which can mean both "firing a weapon", and "shooting a film". This duality is displayed at several levels in the movie: there are two main characters, Ivan and John, the first representing the weapon, the second the movie-making. Indeed, Ivan is trained at shooting and knows how to handle a number of weapons, whereas John is filming throughout the movie, and indeed becomes increasingly obsessed with it - originally, his goal is to free his fiancée, however, towards the end of the movie, he appears entirely absorbed by the film he made of the rescue; the latter, together with his book, will make him famous, as we learn at the end of the movie from Ivan. Ivan, who is also the narrator, clearly describes this madness of John, and indeed it is also this madness which put him into trouble, due to his actions which were all filmed by John: "How did he shoot it all?" he says in the end. The duality is obviously as well a linguistic one, as Ivan is Russian, John is British, and the communication between them is often suboptimal - except that the two different roles of "shooting" are very clear between them. Both of them, John's fiancée, and the captain survive the rescue, but their lives afterwards are very different. Again, their fate seems to have two sides: superficially, one notices that Ivan, who masters weapons, is put on trial, whereas the mad film-maker John becomes famous. Yet, looking deeper, Ivan is victorious, as he keeps his pride: the money he receives from John he gives it all to the captain, who is an idol to him. And although he might seem successful superficially, John is the loser: he has lost his fiancée, who does not marry him, and he has lost his personality to the fame the movie brought him. The movie "War" itself plays in great subtlety with the fact that it is a movie about war, but at the same time a movie about war movie-making - a stylistic feature which is sometimes given the French term "mise en abyme" in fine art: a painting showing a painter while painting, or showing a person looking into a mirror, which reproduces the person looking, ad infinitum... The brutality of several scenes of the movie, reminiscent of Korean-style cinematography, is certainly to be understood from this perspective: it is an underlying criticism of John's fanatic movie-making, the scandalous scenes making him famous. Yet it is rather this thirst for fame which is hostile and strange, even mad - whereas Ivan, ironically the one who really "shoots", keeps his humanity in the end. And the captain, who has long stopped fighting, wins the love of John's fiancée. Hence, although called "War", the movie is, at a meta-level, really about humanity, and love.
