The oft-cited genius of Stanley Kubrick is sometimes decried as cold perfectionism – every tracking shot, every stitch of costume linked in a chain of artistic control. But nowhere does this ruthless manner seem more appropriate than in his unyielding 1957 World War I film “Paths of Glory,” opening today at Film Forum in a glistening new 35 mm restoration. Kubrick’s work mobilizes for us the soul-crushing machinery of war, or to be precise, of men at war.

When a futile advance into enemy territory fails, the cowardly commanding general court-martials three subordinates for dereliction of duty. As so often in 1950s Hollywood, it falls to Kirk Douglas to persuade the unbelievers otherwise. His Colonel Dax bravely led the maligned regiment into enemy fire, but even he, a lawyer in civilian life, gets no quarter from the army hierarchy, engineered to eat its own.

“Paths of Glory” is the sort of movie in which half the runtime goes to officer machinations, kangaroo court proceedings, and the excruciating wait for a head-clutchingly unjust sentence. And before that? They don’t call it the wasteland for nothing: Kubrick’s black-and-white compositions strand Dax and company in a ravaged moonscape of trenches and no man’s land.

Outside, the sunless white sky is exposure itself, wan witness to the slaughter. The trenchmen in their muddied uniforms are city-rat gray, the color of vanishing. Inside, the casket-dark night in the bunkers envelopes Mr. Douglas and company.

The dance of death on the battlefield gets choreographed with an early, brutal example of the director’s beloved tracking shots. For the futile attack, Kubrick tracks alongside the troop’s progress across no man’s land in long shot. Yet even when men begin to fall, the camera rolls ever onward, past the dead, a juggernaut grinding skulls beneath. Mr. Douglas is the ostensible focus, but then the master shot frags into unplaceable smaller shots from across the great nowhere.

Homer’s “Iliad” is striking for its emphasis on the sheer noise of war, the clangor of arms. The 28-year-old Kubrick knew enough to pay attention. Blasts, screams, and otherworldly air-sucking crackles scrape our ears throughout the battle scenes, the cacophony pierced only by Dax pathetically peeping his whistle to orient his men. What we hear from the mouths of the men in the picture isn’t that much more soothing, or meaningful.

General Mireau (George Macready), the ambitious opportunist who ordered the fatal attack, and his sly twinkly superior, General Broulard (Adolphe Menjou), execute diplomatic webs of passive-aggression, their language a tool of insincerity, cynicism, and manipulation. Nothing is more important to Mireau than the safety of his men, he says, right up until Broulard, with an agenda of his own, dangles a promotion.

It’s one war early for catch-22, but you know it when you see it; the sacrifices of the rank and file are reduced to that one word, cowardice, despite their lack of real choice. Men, much less glory or honor, can’t survive such perverse conditions. “Paths of Glory” might give us some solace in the indefatigable Mr. Douglas, that famous dimple being where God left his fingerprint on his noble creation. But the true emotional center of this movie is a sobbing, squirming Timothy Carey, as one of the soldiers led to execution. Clutching at the priest who escorts him, almost breaking the guarded naturalism with his terror, his character is living, to paraphrase the poet, a waking dream that drips with murder.