With the release of “Full Battle Rattle,” the Iraq war documentary has entered its postmodern phase. Directors Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss clearly feel they’ve found a can’t-lose subject: an Army compound of simulated Iraqi villages, complete with orchestrated insurrections, located at Fort Irwin in the Mojave Desert. Yet the resulting film, too hands-off in some respects and too constricted by its style, is oddly unsatisfying.

Granted access by the military, Messrs. Gerber and Moss recorded a series of exercises in August 2006 starring Army soldiers ripe for deployment and Iraqi-American role players. In the fictional seat of Medina Wasl, a fake mayor is in office, fake inhabitants mill about town in traditional dishdasha dress, fake TV reporters make fake news, and fake insurgents (played by real American GIs) stir up trouble. Meanwhile, Lt. Col. Robert McLaughlin earnestly tries to make peace of it all with the help of his very real, rather green troops.

At the very least, “Full Battle Rattle,” which begins a two-week engagement tomorrow at Film Forum, provides data for the standard question of how or whether American soldiers are sufficiently prepared, not just militarily but culturally, for their tours of duty. Lt. Col. McLaughlin and company practice conducting respectful patrols and cordial negotiations, while the Iraqi immigrants joke about how well the setting recalls home. In cutaways, Army personnel in a control room plan scenarios such as bombs and assassinations that are dubbed, with the military’s knack for catchy, authoritative jargon, “injects.”

Yet despite the hall-of-mirrors hook, “Full Battle Rattle” has a streamlined and standard presentation. The filmmakers predigest the material, edit for speed, and spotlight a few role players and soldiers for testimony to the camera in the standard documentary practice of fashioning “characters” we can track. There’s a self-important mayor who misses his comfortable upbringing in pre-Saddam Iraq, two giggly women who are studying for their citizenship exam, a guy who’s awaiting word on a petition for asylum, an ornery G.I. who plays a rebel, and so on.

One might expect a surreal or blackly comic tone, but “Full Battle Rattle” has an oddly upbeat camera-ready feel, both inside and outside the simulations. But a very real problem is the film’s naïve lack of distance from its commanding subject — a textbook documentary mistake (or bogus determination) that views genuine engagement with the material as meddling.

“Full Battle Rattle” is hopelessly overmediated — from the boilerplate descriptions delivered by an Army official, to the Hollywood-esque ubiquitous camera coverage, to the candied digital-video photography of saturated-blue skies and sunburnt ochres, to the inescapable pulse-racing score. And without a genuinely informed viewpoint, the chapter headings that correspond to phases of the conflict (occupation through counterinsurgency and beyond) recapitulate the litany of war mistakes and dangers covered in past documentaries.

The film does have a double-take novelty due to its simulated world, which includes corny mannequins outfitted with gruesome wounds that model actual ones suffered in combat, and a chalkboard where insurgency sorties are scheduled. And the worries and concerns of soldiers and Iraqis alike are as moving as could be expected after being insistently sculpted into packages of emotion and plunked down before us. (One skin-crawling moment that escapes intact involves a woman’s reaction to a simulated beheading video.)

“Full Battle Rattle” opens in a tizzy of war-game scenes in the style of a trailer for a hyperventilating high-octane war movie, but the irony is that the ensuing documentary scenes are often just as superficial. Nearly 30 years ago, the documentarian Frederick Wiseman, taking a different approach, effectively depicted the fog of American-NATO war games in “Manoeuvre.” My fellow Americans, I ask you: Have we learned so little from past documentaries about war simulations?

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