My Favorite Movie of All Time

Rating: 10/10 (31 August 2019)

My stepdad was an MP in Vietnam, and his comment after watching this was, "This wasn't Vietnam... it was somebody's nightmare." My mother's take was that it was "the most satanic movie ever made". The problem with most movie reviewers and critics is that they evaluate every movie based on the same criteria, which only benefits cinema majors. My stepdad's evaluation was based on how closely it portrayed his experience in Vietnam, and that wasn't really the premise of this movie. Vietnam is only used as a setting here for a re-telling of "Heart of Darkness" to make it relatable to modern audiences; anyone with no familiarity with the Conrad novel will completely miss that and dismiss this as a psychotic maligning of the Vietnam War.
This movie was a personal turning point for me. What it excelled at was making me question much of what I'd been taught and shown in my life and my perspectives on things. Willard's line sums it up: "The more I saw of lies, the more I hated them." I came to admire how he abandons any notions of being any more or better than what he is. The real grit of this narrative is how you may not agree with his or Kurtz's methods or understandings or morality, but you can clearly understand how they could arrive at them. So based on the criteria of "movies that made me think", I give it 10 stars. If I were to rate it based on historical accuracy, I'd have to bump that down to 3; at least it depicts the Vietnam leadership as buffoons, which by all accounts they were. If I were to rate it on memorable scenes and quotable lines, again a 10. Casting and acting I'd give a 10. It did a fantastic job of taking a war movie beyond mere battle scenes and into the larger issues of morality and judgment.