Balanced view of war deeds

Rating: 7/10 (25 August 2014)

The movie's story unravels a bit slow at the opening stages although with all those strong images of war. The story gets more interesting about half way the movie plays by depicting the internal conflict.. The set, props and makeup are done nicely, even for that particular time of the movie's production. The things that lack quite a bit are the sound and visual effects. The sound doesn't really give the real feel of stereo location placing, a technology that wasn't yet available. Yet the visual effects look somewhat too much forced, like we see on the lightning scene. The use of throwing flares in firefights is quite stupid since the damage of the unseen bullets are not really visible aside from what the makeup depicted. It's great to see that many alumni of this movie grew into big names such as Tom Berenger, Charlie Sheen, Willem Dafoe, Forest Whitaker, and even Johnny Depp. Most of them acted out really nice performances in this movie.