William Boyd's stirring World War I drama ''The Trench'' joins a sizable list of films that evoke the futility of war and the tragic waste of young lives with a potent and simmering anger. Almost the entire movie, which opens today at Film Forum, is set in a British army trench during the 48 hours leading up to the Battle of the Somme in the summer of 1916. During that battle, Britain suffered 60,000 casualties in what is still considered its worst military disaster.

A traditional ensemble piece that often has the feel of a stage drama, ''The Trench,'' like so many previous antiwar films, follows a surefire emotional strategy. It introduces us to a group of ingenuous young soldiers, many still teenagers, makes us care about several of them (of course, there is the usual bad apple or two), then lowers the inevitable boom.

What lifts ''The Trench'' above the run of the mill is the intensity of its disgust. The soldiers, weaned on anti-German propaganda, are naively gung-ho, even though they have little or no idea of what they're fighting for beyond the necessity of destroying a demonized enemy. When they are finally sent into battle, they are pumped full of alcohol to steel their nerves and shoved onto the field like lambs to slaughter. The film's final images speak for themselves in decrying the senseless carnage.

In one scene after another the movie illustrates the soldiers' susceptibility to gross manipulation in a much more innocent era. When a visiting commander appears with a cameraman to make a morale-boosting silent film clip of the brave men in the trenches, he blatantly lies and assures them that by the time they leave, the British shelling will have eradicated the enemy. At the last minute, their motivation is stoked by the gift of a football and the promise that whoever is the first to kick it over enemy lines will be rewarded with a keg of beer.

''The Trench'' presents a typical movie cross section of types, with the added British twist of having rank determined by class. The 17-year-old Billy Macfarlane (Paul Nicholls, who resembles the young Richard Thomas), is the movie's fresh-scrubbed everyman, a virginal romantic whose pathetic dreams of the future focus on the scrap of photograph he carries of a pretty young woman with whom he once exchanged a few impersonal words in a post office.

Daniel Craig is Telford Winter, the tough, realistic older sergeant with a family back home who consoles himself by eating spoonfuls of his wife's homemade strawberry jam. In a Hollywood movie, he might be played by George Clooney or Ed Harris.

Winter's superior, Second Lieutenant Harte (Julian Rhind-Tutt), whom we grow to loathe, is a remote college-educated dreamer, out of touch with his men, who reads Tennyson for pleasure and continuously tipples brandy from a jealously guarded personal stash. James D'Arcy is Colin Daventry, a cynical soldier too smart for his own good who sees through the official lies. Almost every war movie has a designated coward, and here it is Victor Dell (Danny Dyer), a whiny small-time wheeler-dealer whose collection of dirty pictures makes his companions' eyes pop with wonder.

''The Trench'' is the first movie directed by Mr. Boyd, the highly regarded novelist (''Stars and Bars,'' ''A Good Man in Africa'') and screenwriter (''Chaplin''). If its evocation of the stress of trench life seems carefully muted (the continuous boom of the shelling is lowered to the comfortable sound level of distant thunder), it is far from sanitized, and there are several flashes of gore.

To bring home its message, it also has the de rigueur (and by now cliched) scene of a confused German prisoner being dragged into the trench where (surprise!) he is revealed to be just another scared, quivering-in-his-boots teenage boy grateful for a puff on a cigarette.

THE TRENCH

Written and directed by William Boyd; director of photography, Tony Pierce-Roberts; edited by Jim Clark and Laurence Mery-Clark; music by Evelyn Glennie and Greg Malcangi; production designer, Jim Clay; produced by Steve Clark Hall. At the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, South Village. Running time: 98 minutes. This film is not rated. Through Dec. 5.

WITH: Paul Nicholls (Billy Macfarlane), Daniel Craig (Telford Winter), Julian Rhind-Tutt (Ellis Harte), James D'Arcy (Colin Daventry), Victor Dell (Danny Dyer) and Tam Williams (Eddie Macfarlane).