Mixed feelings...

Rating: 6/10 (1 July 2001)

This movie addresses the audience on many levels, and as a result has to be judged on a few different levels, if we are to give it an accurate rating.
The the basic movie, viewed simply on its own merits with no outside knowledge, is fairly standard fair for a war movie. The special effects are so-so and a product of their times, the acting is sometimes good (Willem Defoe), and sometimes bad (most of the background characters). I thought the dialogue was somewhat less than realistic in a lot of cases, but the movie keeps things moving and holds your attention, so I give it a 7/10 on purely technical merits.
If movies were simply judged on technical merits, we could stop here, but this film strives to go beyond pure entertainment and teach a bit of a lesson, and there is where I think it both shines and stumbles. The moral is pretty in your face, war is foolish, war sucks, war is hell... And Stone certainly makes it appear that way, constantly putting his protagonist in the position to make ethical judgements even the Pope would have a tough time with. My main problem here is that Stone really hits you over the head with the message, and he doesn't really try to be even handed at all with the conflicts the troops faced. For instance, in the village scene which is so obviously a reference to My Lai, the camera dwells on the US troops beating the Vietnamese, but not much attention is given to the deaths of the US soldiers in the previous sequence of events... they die, but because there really isn't time to develop all the characters, there's not as much of an emotional attachment to them... combine that with the (commendably) sympathetic way the Vietnamese are portrayed, and it's hard to fathom the motives of the US troops... they just look like monsters that are randomly shooting Vietnamese women for fun, and yet that's clearly a simplification of the situation, and Stone has to know that, so therefore my feeling is he deliberately biased the shot. That's his call, but my feeling is that with an issue this serious, you shouldn't take the easy way out. Propoganda is bad no matter which side it's coming from. On the moral/ethical message, I'd give the film a 5.5/10... the film's heart is in the right place, but it gets lost in translation sometimes.
Last but not least, I have some serious issues with the historical accuracy of the whole film. As other readers have mentioned, the likelihood of one platoon facing this many problems in the course of a tour of duty in Vietnam was slim to none... While I have no problem with Stone taking some artistic liberty to get his point across, I am disturbed at the emphasis everyone places on "Stone was there, so he must know what it was like." I don't buy that argument - to have a real picture of what's going on, you have to have some distance from the facts or personal bias will get in the way (as I think it does in this case). Anyone who's ever played football knows what I mean... any individual player (other than the quarterback) knows a little bit of what's happening, but doesn't really have any concept of the broad scope of the play. Same goes for war. Troops do what they're told, they don't get briefs on broad strategy. Some might say that's a shortcoming of the system, and they might be right, but it's how it is... If Stone based this movie entirely on his personal experience, then it's bound to be biased, short sited, and most likely factually innacurate, because of the faults of memory and lack of broad strategic knowledge - and if Stone went outside his experiences to make the movie, then his word can't be taken as gospel, like some would. Warning, tangent :) - Anyone that's read "The Red Badge of Courage" knows that it's an excellent book and appears to be totally realistic. Everyone that reads it assumes its author fought in a war... but he didn't. He just did extensive interviews with many, many veterans of that war and others. End tangent :). On historical accuracy, I'd rate the movie at about a 6. It caught the mood of the times, for sure, but it wasn't very balanced, and sometimes it pushes the limits of history to try to make its points and maintain the mood.
Overall I give the film a 6.25/10. It was a good, solid movie, but the low budget and mediocre script/directing kept it from really becoming a classic. Unlike Apocolypse Now or Full Metal Jacket, I think this will just be a once-watched movie... now that I've seen it, I don't think I need to again.