The Human Side Of This Is What Makes It Work So Well

Rating: 8/10 (24 November 2011)

The depiction this film offers of the Battle of La Drang (the first major battle fought by the United States in Vietnam) is brilliant. It's so well re-enacted and so graphic that it truly does give the viewer a taste (but only a taste) of the insanity and sheer violence of war. It's a taste. I was comfortably sitting in my living room watching this. I don't claim to have been able to fully (or even remotely) understand what the soldiers in the midst of the battle were feeling. But it is a taste. Well done, and very sobering. It has to be one of the best battle re-enactments I've ever seen in a movie. As well done as it was, though, it wasn't the depiction of the battle that made this work. One gets desensitized after a while. The sheer scale of the carnage being depicted is overwhelming and from time to time my mind just left the screen as if I needed a break from it. So if this had been all about the battle it wouldn't have been nearly as effective as it was. What made this work was the very effective interweaving of so many very human elements to the story above and beyond just the depiction of the battle. These were, indeed, soldiers, but they were more than soldiers. They were real people, with wives and children and friends back home. Real people with lives that went far beyond what they did on the battlefield. Real people that we cared about because we learned of their lives and of how much reason they had to live and of how tragic it was that so many of them died.
The human elements of the story were shown in many ways. Although sometimes long introductions to a story bother me, I appreciated the somewhat lengthy introduction to this movie. After a brief look at the French experience in Vietnam, the movie shifts to a U.S. Army base where a new division is being put together to go to Vietnam and engage the enemy. We see the unit being formed. We meet the men - more importantly, we meet their families. It was a great way of drawing us into their stories; of reminding us that these were real life flesh and blood men, and not just destined to be battlefield casualty statistics. Later, after deployment and as the battle heats up, we're drawn into the anguish of the families as telegrams are delivered, telling wives that their husbands had been killed - telegrams originally delivered by taxi cab drivers because the Army wasn't ready with chaplains, until the wife of the commanding officer takes over the job of going door to door to break the news. I was impressed by the depiction of the North Vietnamese. They weren't depicted as evil; they weren't caricatured. They were the enemy - but only because this was war. They were soldiers, too - with people who loved them; a point brilliantly made by the use of one Vietnamese soldiers' notebook (eventually picked up by the Americans) that contained a picture of his sweetheart. And, in the end, the movie is clearly shown to be not about war, but about the relationship between the men, as we see Col. Moore's anguish at the loss of so many soldiers and his relief at returning home, and as the point is made that these men didn't fight so much for their country - they fought more for each other.
Mel Gibson I thought pulled off the role of Col. Moore quite well: fiercely devoted to his men, and as commander of the 7th Cavalry determined to avoid the fate that had befallen the commander and troops of a previous 7th Cavalry - Custer at the Little Big Horn. That was an interesting connection that was made several times in the movie. This is a very good war movie, made even better by the fact that it's about more than war - it's about the people who fought and lived and died together, and about the people back home who loved them. (8/10)