Oliver Stone’s Platoon came out in 1986, eleven years after the end of the Vietnam War. It has been a little longer than that — about 13-and-a half-years — since the Iraq War ended, and we now have Alex Garland’s Warfare. I make this comparison not because the two movies are in any way similar, but because they’re completely different, and that difference suggests something about the way we have come to understand the two wars.

Platoon was a big, important movie. It won Best Picture and Best Director in the 1987 Academy Awards. As a child I loved it, because it’s a childish movie. It’s a story about the evils of war, portrayed through the interpersonal conflicts between three American soldiers. One of them is so villainous he oversees a massacre that is clearly a stand-in for the one at My Lai. Another is so virtuous that when the evil character assassinates him, he assumes a Christ-like pose in slow motion. The third is the protagonist, who goes into the war green and naive, and comes out of it schooled in the darkness of humanity. The movie makes heavy use of the soaring melodrama of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings.

Warfare has no such moral lessons to teach the public. It’s a story not so much of a war as of a single battle in that war. Its characters aren’t moral agents with grave choices to make, as they are in Platoon. They’re desperate men trapped in a dangerous, confined space who are trying to get out of it. Their choices are not philosophical, but physical. They react to their circumstances; they don’t shape them.

I’ve never been in the military, much less in combat, so I can’t tell you which film is a more accurate depiction of the realities of war (though I could make an educated guess). But I can discern what they’re trying to do artistically and politically, and, further, what role their respective genres — the Vietnam War Movie and the Iraq War Movie — have played in our understanding of American warmaking.

Platoon was not an outlier in the Vietnam Movie genre of the 1970s and 80s. Its politics may have been more on-the-nose than Full Metal Jacket, The Deer Hunter, or Apocalypse Now, but like those other (and better) movies, it had many of the same things to say. All of those films served as correctives to the Hollywood myth-making that came out of the Second World War. In Europe and the Pacific, the United States had played the role of the world’s cavalry; on film, its heroes were portrayed by stars accustomed to playing cowboys, like Steve McQueen and Ronald Reagan. That rugged individualist tradition of war storytelling continued into the Vietnam War, with John Wayne’s 1968 film The Green Berets. The new crop of war movies was here to tell you that Vietnam was not World War 2. The United States was not the Lone Ranger, galloping into Indochina to save its damsels from the treachery of evildoers.

They were, instead, about America’s loss of innocence. It’s not that these movies lacked for heroes, it’s just that the heroes weren’t cowboys. Their heroism came not from their military prowess, but from the moral integrity that allowed them to see through the propaganda of generals and politicians and recognize the madness of the war around them. In this, they were proxies for the American public, who were learning to see past the mythology of World War 2, to put away childish things, to stop playing Cowboys and Indians.

Warfare is the inverse of both genres. Many of the characters in the film show great competence in combat, but their abilities aren’t showcased as expressions of their awesome courage or moral conviction; if anything, they’re just technical skills, well-executed. These are not cowboy-soldiers, but nor are they literary protagonists experiencing the disenchantment of their received worldviews. This may be in part because, unlike their Vietnam counterparts, the characters in Warfare are professional career soldiers, not conscripts. But I think it has more to do with the fact that the American public no longer needs to be shaken free of our naive attachment to some fairy tale version of war. Vietnam already did that for us. We went into Iraq with a healthy level of cynicism about the entire enterprise of armed conflict and a deep skepticism of the motives of our political leaders that was absent when we first became militarily engaged in Vietnam in the 50s and 60s.

Warfare certainly isn’t a pro-war movie, but I don’t know if I’d call it anti-war. I don’t know if I would have said so about Generation Kill, either, when it came out 17 years ago. Neither is a parable with a lesson at the end; to the extent that they horrify the viewer about the realities of the Iraq War — and that extent is profound — they do so merely by depicting it in an unflinching way. These are not political films, and for good reason. We don’t need to be told what to think about war or what to believe about America’s role in the world anymore. Decades of American foreign policy have belied the childish morality of the fables we were once told. The Iraq War was what the Iraq War was, and what it was was Hell. Warfare only needs to reflect that reality back to us. It doesn’t need to persuade, only depict. And in doing so it makes a more profound impression on its audience than the greatest directors of the 70s and 80s were ever able to.