It is hard to imagine a worse movie!

Rating: 1/10 (29 December 2006)

Those other negative comments that suggest that maybe this movie was good when it came out, but hasn't aged well, are dead wrong! I waited in line to see it on Opening Night in 1978. As a Vietnam veteran and a huge DeNiro fan, I was really looking forward to the first big movie about Nam. And it was as hideous, boring, exploitive, senseless, and unrealistic that night as it is now! They're going to Nam the next day?!? Without any kind of basic training or anything? The Walken character survives how many years playing Russian roulette?? How does DeNiro get away with that beard in Special Forces? I knew many soldiers from Western Pennsylvania steel mills, but not one with Walken's blow-dried hair-do that not even New York dancers were wearing till the late '70s! Okay, so let's suspend disbelief and not criticize its lack of anything vaguely realistic. In that case, we are left with a boring, long, boring, disjointed, boring, meaningless, exploitive piece of crap that had nothing whatever to do with the Vietnam War. And did I mention boring? For those who want a movie about the Vietnam War, I recommend Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, and a wonderful almost-unknown Burt Lancaster movie called Go Tell The Spartans that also came out in '78. Almost every Vietnam vet I know liked Apocalypse Now -- almost all thought The Deer Hunter was crap. And Cimino's later career supplies ample evidence for that point of view!