Your favourite Vietnam War film?

[Carson Dyle]

Don't even start me on War of the Worlds and the whole unlikely reunion at the end.

I hear you, but it gets back to my point about S.P.R.

The difference between sentimentality and over-sentimentality is that the former is earned whereas the latter is stolen. Given the carnage and cruelty of films like Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, and War of the Worlds, and considering the gut-wrenching journeys the protagonists in those films are subjected to, I'm willing to grant Spielberg his slice of cheese. From my perspective, the guy tends to earn it.

Anyway, yeah, Vietnam. Anyone here ever read David Halberstam on the subject?

Reason I ask, I still think "The Best and the Brightest" would make a terrific film given the right cinematic structure. The behind-the-scenes story of how we blundered into Vietnam is dramatically rich material, and God knows it's timely.

 

[Trooperdad]

Read the whole topic and loved it.

We Were Soldiers
Uncommon Valor (not mentioned and is a post Vietnam movie)
Green Baret (nostalgic Vietnam movie - first one I saw as a kid)
Platoon and FMJ (showed the insanity of war, especially Vietnam)

I really like Uncommon Valor because of the story and having 4 sons I would go to the ends of the earth to get them back or even what Robert Stack said about how he'd give up everything he has just to spend 1 hour with them.

Don G.

 

[cayman shen]

See, it seems to me that Green Berets is tonally off, not as a film but as a piece of art that reflects the spirit of the age. It's a throwback, a movie for another war.

To digress, is it odd that, having been born in 1975, I feel a strong affinity for Vietnam history and tales and so forth? I gobbled up Tim O'Brien novels for instance, and felt, I dunno, a bond. For a kid raised in the safe, cushy, conformist and uncontroversial 80s, perhaps I felt the lure of the romance for a more intense era. Wierd, huh? Maybe its because of all I heard from my father and my admiration for him. I found two bronze stars in his closet once, and he's never told me what they were for.

 

[gavidoc]

While Barnes was a composite, the other two leads -- Chris and Elias -- were based on actual people... Chris was Oliver Stone, no less.

I get what you're saying, but I still thought I'd point it out.

yeah I know they are based on actual characters but the key word is "based." There was only one composite character (that I know of in We Were Soldiers) and that was Gogeghan who the director composited with another Lt. who was killed and was a Congressional Medal of Honor winner (only one who was awarded one for the fighting on the actual ground). The manner in which he died was accurate but the events that lead up to it (charging the enemy around the termite mounds) was what Lt. Marn (I think that was his name was) did. The others were the actual characters. Gibson was Moore who was well....Moore. Not like Sheen who was Chris who was really Stone.

Another BIG difference is that you have to put your "faith" in Stone which well....JFK anyone? While with We Were Soldier's you have an actual documented event that was written by a reporter and a Lt. Gen. Big difference. I HIGHLY recommend you read the book as the 2nd half of the battle was even more intense that LZ X-Ray that is portrayed in the film.

The book goes into grim detail about 2nd half of the battle and how another battalion is ambushed and literally cut to pieces with the NVA going through the grass killing the wounded and the effort some men took to make it back to base before they pulled out. One guy crawled miles with a bullet in his head just to arrive as the last men were pulling out IIRC while another was wounded during the fighting, hid, was seen by a young NVA soldier and allowed to live and stayed in hiding till he was picked up by a passing Heuy 7 days after the fight and the US had pulled out of the area.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,842242-2,00.html

 

[dbuck]

See, it seems to me that Green Berets is tonally off, not as a film but as a piece of art that reflects the spirit of the age. It's a throwback, a movie for another war.

No kidding. A standard John Wayne WWII flick using a Vietnam backdrop. Well, except for all those pine trees.

Wayne turned down the Dirty Dozen for that flick. Oops.

 

[Carson Dyle]

For a kid raised in the safe, cushy, conformist and uncontroversial 80s, perhaps I felt the lure of the romance for a more intense era. Wierd, huh?

Not at all.

I feel the same way about WWII, but I try to keep my "romantic" feelings in perspective.

My dad was Lt. Commander aboard an escort carrier in the South Pacific. Like a lot of guys who've seen war he didn't like to talk about it, but when I was a kid the whole thing seemed incredibly cool, and I used to pester him for stories.

He was a hard case, but I eventually wore him down. In vivid detail, he described how a friend, having caught a chunk of shrapnel during an aerial attack, bled out in his arms.

I was 13 at the time, and it was the last time I ever asked my dad about the war.

 

[CTF]

Another BIG difference is that you have to put your "faith" in Stone which well....JFK anyone? While with We Were Soldier's you have an actual documented event that was written by a reporter and a Lt. Gen. Big difference.

But we put our faith in a director each and every time we sit down to watch a movie... no matter what we think of them. As Mr. Hearst once said: "Never let truth get in the way of a good story!" And that movie they based on him is is pretty good, I hear.

Really, if I want historical fact, then I'll watch the History Channel.

Or, better yet, read a book.

 

[Colin Droidmilk]

I guess I'm a little less forgiving...I see a once great, lean and mean and clever, but populist, filmmaker growing into an old man with a soft spot for sentimental pap. Don't even start me on War of the Worlds and the whole unlikely reunion at the end. Jeez Louise was that corny, stoneless, crowd pleasing goofiness. Where's the guy who gave us Empire of the Sun?

Sorry though, I digress: Vietnam films...

I know what you mean, but I liked Carson's angle on the pap in SPR being a kind of psychological security blanket for the director, without which he could never have given us stuff like that Omaha scene. So yeah, if schmaltz is the price to pay for a scene like that, I'm willing to pay it.

(However there's no excuse for WoW. No uncharted territory in that movie, no security blanket required.)

 

[Ttaskmaster]

Really, if I want historical fact, then I'll watch the History Channel.
Or, better yet, read a book.

I think that's one of the biggest problems with making films about something factual - A lot of people don't/won't go learn the facts behind the story.

U571 is a good example.
I'm more than happy to watch 'Aliens Vs Robin Hood', if it's a good film and I know the difference between the fact and the fiction. The problem is that some people will watch it and think RH was some English dude who fought extra-terrestrials with his band of merry men.

Already more kids think Winston Churchill is an insurance-flogging dog, rather than one of the UK's greatest leaders.

 

[agent5]

I think Ryan is a hokey piece of flag waving nostalgia cheese. The falling to the knees at the end actually made me roll my eyes.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought that was incredibly overdone. Spielberg did the exact same thing at the end of Munich when Bana is making love to his wife and recalling the Munich massacre. Just too over the top. It would have been much more genuine if he just colapsed into his wifes arms and cried like a baby.

 

[Solo4114]

Not at all.

I feel the same way about WWII, but I try to keep my "romantic" feelings in perspective.

My dad was Lt. Commander aboard an escort carrier in the South Pacific. Like a lot of guys who've seen war he didn't like to talk about it, but when I was a kid the whole thing seemed incredibly cool, and I used to pester him for stories.

He was a hard case, but I eventually wore him down. In vivid detail, he described how a friend, having caught a chunk of shrapnel during an aerial attack, bled out in his arms.

I was 13 at the time, and it was the last time I ever asked my dad about the war.

And this gets back to the sort of zeitgeist point I was trying to make earlier. After (and during) WWII, the people telling the stories about the war were telling incredibly cool adventure stories which were, by and large, fairly bloodlessly depicted. That became the touchstone for a generation about what war was. There's a degree to which even the generation that actually fought in the war (or was around for it, even if they didn't serve) was sort of complicit in this general acceptance of the sanitized, good-guys vs. bad-guys depiction of the war. That may be because they simply wanted to forget the reality, or push it to the back of their mind.

Then along comes Vietnam, a war whose causes are murky, where the method of fighting wasn't storming beaches and tank maneuvers and such, where the TV is showing you -- daily -- images of guys missing limbs and dying horribly for....what? To stop those commies? After a while that starts to ring hollow, and people are disillusioned, and the generation that grew up with the "myth" of WWII starts telling stories about the reality of Vietnam -- some of them from firsthand experience.

So, even if the truth of each of the wars may be fairly similar (death is always horrible, war is always brutal, soldiers are humans and as such display the full range of human emotion, etc.), the Vietnam movies of the 70s and 80s are, I think, a product of and reaction to (partially) the WWII movies of the 50s and 60s (and even the 40s propaganda films).

 

[CTF]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought that was incredibly overdone. Spielberg did the exact same thing at the end of Munich when Bana is making love to his wife and recalling the Munich massacre. Just too over the top. It would have been much more genuine if he just colapsed into his wifes arms and cried like a baby.

"Just you shut your mouth..."

When Spielberg is on his game his mastery of narrative is damn near unsurpassed. Both the sappy sentiment noticeable in the cheesy framing story, as well as the annoying over-reliance on trite "war movie" conventions, are part of the deal, part of what Spielberg needs for security in order to push mainstream filmmaking into uncharted directions.

This was always discussed over on Awalt's Speilberg boards; along with the dissolve from [old] Ryan's face to the beach... and the action that he never witnessed!

 

[cayman shen]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought that was incredibly overdone. Spielberg did the exact same thing at the end of Munich when Bana is making love to his wife and recalling the Munich massacre. Just too over the top. It would have been much more genuine if he just colapsed into his wifes arms and cried like a baby.

See, I enjoyed Munich and was okay with the end because the intercutting was, to my mind, successful. But I can see how you would have that reaction. I forgot about that movie. I enjoyed it tremendously.

Has anyone mentioned Heaven and Earth? Stone's third Nam film? I saw it when it first came out and liked it, but I was like 18, so I really don't know how it holds up over time. I was easier to please then.

 

[CTF]

See, I enjoyed Munich and was okay with the end because the intercutting was, to my mind, successful. But I can see how you would have that reaction. I forgot about that movie. I enjoyed it tremendously.

Munich is one of my favourite films, period.

It is definitely one of the 'berg's masterpieces!

In regards to We Were Soldiers, I dunno if it was Mel doing his usual schtick, or the horrid digital shots (where a Huey flies directly into the lens), but I just can't sit through it... just ain't for me, is all. But I can appreciate why people prefer it to Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, etc. :thumbsup

 

[switchblade_slinger]

I only recently saw CofW. Agree. Very under rated.

Of all people to agree with MicDavis... I agree. I saw CofW when it came
out in the theater, mostly because I was a Marty McFly/Jeff Spicoli fan... Sean Penn's performance was DEFINITELY not Spicoli. I knew about 'Falcon and the Snowman', but it was not war or Science Fiction, so I didn't rush to see it. CofW left me questioning a lot of things. This is after I had squeaked into 'Platoon' several times a few years earlier.
'Platoon's' villiage scenes with Barnes' murder scene and Bunny's 'let's do this whole effin' villiage' right behind were stark stand outs for my fifteen year old mind. I had only seen 'the Green Berets' before that, and my 'Nam experience was limited to the dim television memories from my childhood and my uncle Wayne drinking Jack Daniels while He shook like a dog crappin' razor blades and told stories about wave after wave of Vietnamese soldiers and his friends who missed out on becoming a member of the 'walking dead'.

Thanks, MicDavis. Good call.