Stone Never Lets The Facts Get In His Way

Rating: 1/10 (2 August 2007)

Uh, excuse me but Democrat Lyndon Johnson is the President who escalated our involvement, troop-wise, into the Vietnam War - big-time, not Republican Richard Nixon, who wound up getting us out of there. But who does Liberal extremist filmmaker Oliver Stone pick on in the film? Nixon, the Republican, of course! Who else?
Stone, like most of his contemporaries, will never make a Democrat look bad but Nixon - oh, man, he's the Liberal's favorite target....until GWB came along. Stone, like Michael Moore, just looks the other way when it comes to unimportant little things such as "facts."
Who better to costar in an "anti-Vietnam" movie than "Hanoi" Jane Fonda? She must have done this role for free, relishing a Leftist propaganda opportunity like this!
Unlike Fonda, who at least cooled her rhetoric a decade later, Stone seemed obsessed by Vietnam for years. He was still at it in 1986 with "Platoon." He still obsesses over every Liberal cause, like a conspiracy under every rock. Sadly, like Moore, Stone has the power and finances to inflict all his prejudices on the public in the form of movies.....and people what they see on screen.
For every "Ron Kovic," the main subject of the film and a real-life guy who turned out to be a very bitter ex-soldier, there are thousands of military heroes who are proud to have represented the U.S.A. in Southeast Asia and have no regrets for doing so, but filmmakers like Stone will never do stories about them. Kovic, by the way, was wounded on his second tour. He was awarded medals for bravery. If he won a dozen medals but did not turn out to be an anti-war spokesman, you would have never heard of him. Hollywood and the media only glorify the left side of the political spectrum.
Casting Tom Cruise in the lead was a good idea. Most people can't stand him in real life, so playing a nagging whiner for much of the three hours made him easy to dislike.
Stone is a capable, knowledgeable filmmaker who isn't afraid to try different techniques (witness the unpleasant but fascinating "Natural Born Killers."). However, his films would so much better if he could just control putting so much of his own political Republican-hating agenda into every one of them, this one included.