Wow

Rating: Null/10 (24 May 2005)

Casualties of War is a movie I got for $5 at the WalMart "bargain bin" because it looked like it might be an OK movie. When I got it home and watched it, I realized why it was in the bargain bin. This is a movie that is cheaply made, poorly edited, has bad acting, and is not a good testament to an extremely serious topic.
The movie basically follows a squad of American soldiers in Vietnam as they capture, rape, and kill a young Vietnamese girl. It is told from the perspective of Michael J Fox who is the one guy opposed to it. I'm no fan of war and I realize that few good things ever come out of it, but this movie didn't do it justice. It was first of all not very good acting, despite having Sean Penn and Michael J Fox, which was surprising. The scenes with the Vietnamese girl where actually kind of hard not to laugh at because she spent the entire team just whining in an extremely annoying tone. I don't know what language it was, but it wasn't Vietnamese. There is also a lot of completely random and unneeded dialog, such as when Michael J Fox meets with the black lieutenant who rambles on about his life story with no relevance whatsoever to the movie.
Finally the special effects are terrible. The opening scene is jungle combat where explosions are just a bunch of sparks (they look like cheap fireworks) and when a VC soldier gets shot and is supposed to fall back into his tunnel, it is extremely obvious that someone pulled him down. In several scenes you can clearly tell that two shots have been fused together. Perhaps the worst of it all was when they finally stab the Vietnamese girl. You can see the knife go in ... and the BOUNCE back out. Watch it carefully, I promise it will be the worst special effect you will ever see. And all of these things are just off the top of my head.
Overall, this movie has a good concept but a terrible execution, and in the end is just disrespectful. You come away thinking that the mindset of the directors must have been, "OK, we're going to do an anti-war film demonstrating all the horrors and brutality of war and human suffering it causes, but we're going to do it cheaply and cheesy."