A squad of soldiers finds itself stranded behind enemy lines. The soldiers are members of an unspecified army, fighting an unspecified war. We are given their names and ranks, but little more. Kubrick’s first feature film, written by future Pulitzer Prize winner Howard Sackler, is an existentialist exercise in the meaninglessness of war, played out in an eerie zone of suspended dread. Fear and Desire asks us to behold humanity set free of foundational beliefs. The soldiers are “further imperiled . . . by an unseen but deadly enemy who, upon scrutiny, seems to be almost shaped from the same mold,” Kubrick wrote.