Verisimilitude

Rating: 2/10 (17 May 2006)

The focus here is on 'realism', at the expense of the drama and cinema...in fact, all of those values are crushed out by the slavish devotion to 'telling it like it was'.
There are two obliquely related stories; the story set in Vietnam, and Sheen's framing narration...they're an honest mismatch, so the two are forcefully melded together, in order to drive home the moralizing tone.
Most of this movie is visually unimportant...the only attempt at worthwhile visual narrative is the juxtaposition of Elias' (botched) death scene against Barnes' demonic rage. Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' is implied (more effectively expounded upon in "Apocalypse Now", and of course, "Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes").
How many vets bore such an existential crisis? No matter, this is the one that got the most thumbs up from the servicemen.
Stone was out to overturn the perspective of things like "The Green Berets"; they just weren't real enough...in doing so, he started the trend of all successive war films (whether about this war or any other) needing to establish plausibility through tedious attention to detail.
So all we get is a morality play, nothing that needs to be displayed on film. This was all nicely deflated in Seinfeld's "The Fatigues" episode (the overuse of the 'Adagio' theme music).