Roessner hasn’t written an anti-war or pro-war film. Sand Castle merely shows the honesty of war’s infinite complexities.

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.

It’s a stale, phony, grunt-level sort of view of American intervention, cast in large part with Brits and shot in the familiar desert backlots of Jordan, which has stood in for the site of one Middle Eastern conflict after another since "Lawrence Of Arabia."

A combat movie that’s as generic as they come.

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.