The political-minded drama "Stop-Loss" is the first must-see film of the season, and though it has its shortcomings, it is the first studio-produced film to address the aftermath of U.S. soldiers returning to a post-Sept. 11 culture that has real impact.

It isn't interested in adding fuel to the current quagmire in Iraq, but in transporting us into the minds of the soldiers that signed up to protect the nation after Sept. 11 and are then forced to re-enlist due to a de facto draft that orders them to return to Iraq for second or third tours of duties.

I heard people mumbling about the film's stance on stop-loss policies and the sure-to-be-argued ending, but there is no political agenda here. There is a fine line among politics and preaching, and to its credit, it is able to transcend the dull public policies and agenda-setting political propaganda that afflicted last fall's deluge of Iraq-centric films. It is an unsentimental and hard-hitting film about tough moral choices that is a punch in the stomach to the cinematic fast food the studios seem to be churning out on a regular basis these days.

The blood-drenched opening shots - the sole sequence set in Iraq - are among the best the film has to offer. There is a hand-held quasi-docudrama feel to the proceedings as Sgt. Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) and his troop of men are introduced through homemade short films (a fact-based conceit that is repeated throughout the film) right before heading into a bloodbath pursuing a group of rebel insurgents.

The situation soon careens out of control and the troop is ambushed. The results are brutal and not for the squeamish. The sequence is staged for full effect and can stand up against the best battle scenes shot for shot. It is a horrible nightmarish scene Brandon and his troop return to again and again as the trauma manifests itself in bad dreams, bar fights and as images of corpses in the bottoms of pools.

Brandon gets a hero's homecoming (and a chest full of medals) for courage under fire, but it can't erase the horrors he has seen. There are hints he has seen much too much, but he has sensible parents to offer support and a clear head on his shoulders. The other members of the troop are coming apart at the seams. Sgt. Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum) bolts out of bed in the middle of the night to dig a hole to sleep in and the doomed Tom Burgess (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) turns to alcohol to replace the outlet the battlefield supplied his hot-headed nature and ruins his marriage in the process.

These scenes feel clichéd since these are staples from other films that detailed the struggles of soldiers to reacclimate to their old life, but be patient; it has far greater ambitions than patching together pieces from its cinematic predecessors.