One cannot fault the ambition of Elisabeth Bronfen's Specters of War. Covering a range of Hollywood filmmaking about martial conflict, Bronfen sets out to illustrate how war films testify to the ways “American culture continually renegotiates the traumatic traces of its historical past, reconceiving current social and political concerns in light of previous military conflicts” (2).

While acknowledging a debt to film historians, especially Robert Burgoyne, Bronfen distinguishes her work through a psychoanalytic as opposed to historical framework and a radically expanded scope. Instead of zeroing in on the depiction of a particular war or how war has been depicted within a particular period of Hollywood's history, Specters offers close readings of trans-generic films about a variety of American military conflicts – from the Civil War through to Iraq – produced from early cinema to the present day.

This breadth of filmmaking is deployed to demonstrate the vast and inescapable cultural haunting of war within American cinema. To distinguish the different nuances to this haunting, Bronfen close-reads an average of six films within chapters organized by thematic connections. Broadly, Specters is split in two: the middle chapter looks at the battlefield on screen, while the first half explores themes of “home as an emotional and geographical point of departure for those going to war” (241) through films about the home front and war entertainment. Meanwhile, the second half looks at “the way knowledge is returned home again” (241) through the continued presence of war reporting, court-martial dramas and veterans' stories on screen.

Resisting a chronological approach, Bronfen aims to follow Mieke Bal's “preposterous” form of reading history. This, she explains, enables her to make “unexpected connections that need not be based on any solid evidence of a relation between the texts” (8).

This freedom allows Bronfen to explore some unique comparisons. For instance, homing in on the double meaning within the phrase “theatre of war” Bronfen is able to draw a thread from wartime entertainment and USO Camp shows within White Christmas (1954) to, of all places, Apocalypse Now Redux (2001) to illustrate how these films and others continually comment on the spectacle of real war.

Likewise, the chapter on war reporting finds a World War II film about journalist Ernie Pyle, The Story of G.I. Joe (1945), included alongside Errol Morris's documentary on Abu Ghraib, Standard Operating Procedure (2008). In their juxtaposition, the films become demonstrative of cinema's continued enmeshing of documentary and fiction, part of a search for an “authentic” depiction of war never realized.

While the scope of Specters allows for new points of continuity and comparison, indicative of the cultural unfinished business of war, its wide sweep leaves one wanting more specificity. Although an engaging survey, it is diffuse. Bronfen's aerial view forces a reduction of the complexities at play in the vastly different moments at which these reformulations of past conflicts resurface. While we can see, adroitly demonstrated with keen-eyed analysis, how Hollywood keeps coming back to different thematic elements of war films across its history in her selected moments, less clear is why these reconceptualizations continually return. Allusions are made throughout the text to shifts in American public opinion and events that have altered cinema's revisiting of the past, but the range of periods to contend with leaves these allusions imprecise.

The most persuasive passages come when Bronfen keeps her gaze tightly focussed, allowing for a fuller discussion of the cultural shifts that bear on cinematic depictions of war. For instance, within a chapter on the choreography of battle, Bronfen uses Hollywood's portrayal of D-Day as a case study. Here, Specters feels more attuned to the influence of propaganda forces on films made during the war, engaged more specifically with the Cold War contexts that shaped The Longest Day (1962) and the cultural shifts that gave rise to the authenticating and remembering veteran present in Steven Spielberg's millennial meditation on World War II, Saving Private Ryan (1998). In this chapter, and select passages elsewhere, her argument about cinematic haunting and the way cinema continually returns to key moments in America's national past feels sharply executed; notably this is when Bronfen draws out the explicit intertextual connections she claims not to require.

Specters of War surveys a vast range of filmmaking and provides an overview of the continuing thematic engagements of war films though close textual analysis. Though demonstrating patterns, the heart of “why?” still remains underexplored and leaves the reader wanting. Consequently, despite the beginnings of an ambitious argument, one ultimately leaves Specters persuaded but not wholly convinced.