Brian DePalma's best

Rating: 8/10 (23 August 1999)

May contain small spoilers:
Someone once wrote, "War is hell." And that is true. When a war is finished one side is declared winner and the other one has to pay war reparations. But really, there is never a winner in war. Life is lost, land is destroyed and crimes are committed. And I think that is the real issue in this film. If a crime is committed in the battle field, does one deserve to get punished for it? I have never been to war and I thank God for that, but I still think my opinion is a valid one. No one deserves to be brutalized ( I understand death on the battlefield is acceptable) or violated during war. That means anyone from a POW to an innocent civilian. Watching this film made me look at us as human beings and ask the question that I have asked so many times. What's wrong with us? What is it that makes people behave the way we do towards each other or towards other living things? It is a question that I think is impossible to get an answer for. Watching this film is hard because it takes a dark and evil subject and puts it right before our eyes. Reading about it would be bad enough, but to see it right before our eyes on 35 mm film is raw. And it is an experience that I will never forget.
What is bad about this film is the opening ten minutes and the final five. That is when we see Erickson in the present. It is a completely different film and these scenes have no business in the film itself. But if you discard fifteen minutes of film, what you are left with is one of the grittiest, most realistic and frustrating films to watch. What we see is six soldiers that are in the battle field. They kidnap a village girl because they are angry and frustrated with the war. She has nothing to do with it and the only crime she has committed is that she is a Vietnemese girl. Two of the soldiers are adament about the kidnapping and only one of them is dead set against it and actually shows remorse and resistance. The leader is Meserve, played with ferociousness by Sean Penn. I believed his portrayal so much that I really have a hard time watching him as the fun loving Spicolli in Fasttimes now. He plays Meserve with anger, bitterness and spite. He is angry, at what? Who knows. The war, the situation, the surroundings. Probably all of that. But his anger goes much deeper than that. I think he is just angry for being born and he is taking it out on the world, and this one unfortunate village girl happens to be his scratching post.
The rape scenes are especially hard to watch. They are on par with any of the rape scenes in Last House On The Left, and her death is just as disturbing as the ones in LHOTL and 8mm. Her death was meaningless and it could have been avoided. And when she died, I felt terrible. I felt ashamed that as a member of the human species one of my own kind could do this to another human.
To make this film work you have to have good performances. Sean Penn and Michael J. Fox are great. As I said Penn is so realistic that he bothers me now. Fox has a tricky role because you not only have to empathize with his character but he has to go through a wide array of emotions. Penn is just angry, Fox is all over the map. And he does an incredible job. Also good in her role is the girl who played the Vietnemese girl. DePalma let her write all her own dialogue and it is appropriate that she is not subtitled. None of her attackers would know what she is saying, so why should we? Besides, someone getting raped is a hard enough scene to watch in any launguage.
It's really too bad that the first and last parts of the film weren't handled better because this could have been one of the best films ever made. I still do hold it high on my list as one of the best war films ever made though. But I have to warn you, Saving Private Ryan is tough to watch because of its gritty realism on the battlefield. This one is just as hard to watch because we can put a face to the person that is getting violated. This should be a film that everyone sees once. Not so much because it is about war but because it is about how human beings are really a sick species, this film and incidents like it prove that. And that is sad.