An honourable failure

Rating: 5/10 (23 June 2020)

I really love Spike Lee and probably subscribe to 90% of his politics but this film didn't work for me and didn't seem to succeed on its own terms. I think it deserves praise for aiming quite high and taking creative risks and there were scenes and ideas that were effective and stayed with me despite the issues. Hence, it's an honourable failure.
Firstly, as noted elsewhere tonally this film leaps a lot. I think this is deliberate as a way of showing the way the characters relive and misremember their wars. It's probably the most post modern war film I've seen in a while. One very interesting device is swapping to the cheesy soundtracks, grainy look and aspect ratio of an 80s action film. It's constantly reminding us how Hollywood retconned Vietnam with it's own myth making.
That would be fine in itself if there wasn't also the attempt to go one further and juxtapose the Hollywood dream version with really graphic documentary footage of the sort that Ken Burns used unflinchingly in his Vietnam series. I was most struck by a lingering shot of a small child with their face blown off and could see that Lee wanted this to have a huge impact. I think Lee wanted the audience to ask what we wanted to see - violence as entertainment or something darker.
The point is if you're going to go there, you need to handle the rest of the film as seriously or at least succeed absolutely in balancing elements of farce and exploitation with real life atrocities.
And this is where the flippant nature of the action adventure stuff undercut the serious themes to the point where it started feeling disrespectful or exploitative rather than challenging. The most glaring example was introducing the mine removal squad when they did which basically took any of the pathos out of the jungle walk as it became all about "who will step on the mine", and even played it up by having a character make a big campy speech while walking back into the undergrowth to meet the inevitable splatter. This was so telegraphed as it HAD to be played for laughs, but then immediately followed by a gory aftermath and a tense situation where another character had to escape the same fate. Despite being a film about PTSD, minutes later everyone (even the non vets) were apparently over the horror.
I do think this cutting between modes of telling the Vietnam story is deliberate and overall the film probably works best when seen as a collage of impressions of war, trauma and entertainment but that does mean it's pretty much the antithesis of good story telling.