Watch With Mental Filter

Rating: 7/10 (4 October 2012)

Remember that Oliver Stone has a reputation for being wildly Left Wing, with regard to the war in particular. He really stacks the deck in this one. He makes sure you know that only the lower classes fought, that any given platoon was filled with murderous sadists, that everyone smoked weed and drank, and that almost no one believed in the cause, except the one evil guy. Also remember that this is a movie starring Charlie Sheen, narrating what it's like to be in the jungles of Vietnam. Does that remind you of something? Yes, his dad already did that in Apocalypse Now, 7 years earlier. So that draws away from the originality of this one. But I did like the central conflict of a nice Sergeant versus a barbaric, yet effective one. Both were brave and effective soldiers, employing very different tactics. Before I get to the repeated sadism, let me remind everyone that the war was not just about some lower class American guys shooting up some local Asian peasants in funny hats. America was fighting the superpowers of China and the U.S.S.R., who were backing the North Vietnamese, and who had designs on world domination. Also remember that Communism murdered millions upon millions of people, including Cambodians, once the Americans went home. I think the movie did do a decent job of showing you the dialog and daily mannerisms of low class men, when left alone. In most cases, whomever you were back home, will still be with you in the jungle. If you were the type of guy who shirked responsibility or blamed others for your mistakes, or you were self-indulgent, or lazy, etc., you will be that at war too. Interestingly there is only one Christian depicted, and that is a quiet Hispanic Catholic soldier who never speaks. I would think that in real life, even many uneducated, small town soldiers would still be Christians. The two Sergeants were too old to be draftees. So they were career military. But they act like common soldiers. Even though Sergeants are not officially "Officers," a career soldier might be more conservative that the way these guys were portrayed. I'll grant the fact that Stone was apparently a soldier there himself, and I was not. I don't doubt that some of the clichÃ©s you see in these movies are true. But they just tend to be one-sided. Tom Berenger was excellent, as was Willem Dafoe. Despite what a weird guy Sheen wound up becoming in real life, I have to say that I like him in those 80s movies. There was something very natural about his acting. I don't think Johnny Depp even spoke in this one, and Kevin Dillon played the same kind of guy he would wind up playing for the next quarter century. The gung-ho dumb-dumb. Music was not employed with the same degree of effectiveness in this one, as it was in Apocalypse Now. Too violent for me, but I did like the way the picture showed the daily frustrations of lack of sleep, leeches, personality conflicts, and fear.