Fails even at being a bad movie

Rating: Null/10 (19 March 2002)

I feel ashamed that I was suckered into seeing this garbage. I am not one of those people that dismisses war movies, but this film is just an insult to our collective intelligence. In my opinion, there are two types of war movies, ones that tell stories and ones that exist for the action. Both can be quite good, as anyone that has seen Black Hawk Down can attest. Where this movies fails is in its attempt to do both at once. What results is a film that has a horrible plot and just plain boring violence. So what if some soldiers die, all I was doing was looking at my watch.

I must confess I have not read the book and know little about Vietnam or war in general. What I do recognize however are unconvincing action sequences filtered so that no one storms out of the theatre. If there was even the slightest attempt to do research into the weaponry and tactics in the actual battle, I would not have been so badly disapointed. As it is, all I see are a bunch of actors pretending to react to special effects. Also, for a movie that places so much emphasis on the "brotherhood" of soldiers, there is remarkably little concern shown to racial stereotypes in its plot. The vietnamese are little more than cannon fodder in this film, and there isn't even an attempt made to show the trappings of real people.
In conclusion, I would like for people to really think the next time they see a war movie: is this American flag here really saying something, or is it just a colorful piece of scenery used to prop up the semblance of a story? Films can do better.