Brooding mixture of fear, introspection and blood.

Rating: Null/10 (16 December 1999)

I recently reread Norman Mailer's "The Naked and the Dead", though I have never read the Jones novel on which this film is based. But the style and subjectmatter are very similar. Some of the plot lines I had trouble following and some of the dialogue was difficult to pick up. Subtitles would have helped me understand some of the sequences with the Japanese. Also, I would have preferred fewer celebrity bit-parts - I didn't listen to Travolta's lines since I was checking the credits to ensure he was actually in the film. Like the original Mailer book, this movie reminds us very effectively of the terrible suffering by men in the infantry in ground wars. In recent years it has not been politically correct to recognise this. Yet it is inevitable that, whenever some foreign group's men become aggressive and expansionist, good local men suffer. And, in the past, they have suffered most and in greater numbers, than the women and other minorities whose contributions we applaud today.