Portent of Things to Come

Rating: 6/10 (7 June 2003)

I wasn't expecting much from this film because many of the reviews I'd read at the time of its release argued that it, and the book it was based on, were retrograde. The US soldiers provide the heroes and the North Vietnamese the villains. But it wasn't nearly so simple as that.
Obviously it's been heavily influenced by "Saving Private Ryan", at least in one respect. It's even gorier than SPR. If a phosphorous grenade explodes, we see the Grunt with the flaming stuff stuck to his skin and clothing, burning holes into him, and we see a buddy cutting away the burning flesh of his cheek with a knife. When a Grunt is caught in a friendly-napalm blast he really burns and afterward his charred flesh is blackened, so that when a buddy tries to take his legs and pull him towards a Medivac the flesh of both legs from the knees down peels off into his buddy's hands. And of course there is squib charge upon squib charge exploding in slow motion, an unfortunate cliché by now.
One wonders just in passing how far this trend towards realistic gore can go -- and what the purpose behind the trip is. Well, it can't go much farther than it has. It seems just a short time ago that "M*A*S*H" had one shocking scene in it -- a wounded soldier in a hospital whose arterial blood pumped out of his body towards the surgeon. Actually it was more than thirty years ago. But our cinematic carnage has progressed by leaps and bounds. "M*A*S*H" was an early milestone. So was "Bonny and Clyde," which introduced slow-motion death to American movies. "Saving Private Ryan" was a shocking blood bath. Now we have "Blackhawk Down", with a still-living soldier whose lower half has been blown away. And now there's "We Were Soldiers."
As for WHY there has been such an increase of realism in violence, well, that's a different question whose answer can only be guessed at. Many cinematic movements like this one seem to follow a trajectory in which each film must out-do the previous examples of the genre. If gore is good box office, then more gore is even better box office. There may be a sincere desire on the part of the producers to show combat as it really is, but like all motives this one may be mixed, with some commercial interests thrown into the stew. And the motives of the audiences who turn these films into marketable products? It would be nice to think that they leave the theaters having learned something about the results of combat. But if that's the case, we don't seem to be showing much evidence of having grasped the lesson. In a sense, sensational gore cheapens and degrades the experience of the men and women who have lived through these extreme situations. So much suffering brings tears to the eyes, especially when we see the survivors visiting graves and monuments after the battle, as we do both here and in "Saving Private Ryan." And then, having wept, the audience leaves the theater and embraces the next war. The arousal jag is over. Good intentions, when viewed from a slightly different angle, have an uncanny way of resembling exploitation.
Okay. Enough philosophy. The movie is better than I'd expected it to be, the excess of gore and the slow-motion clichés aside. (I was also confused by the topography, although locations are clearly labelled. Where exactly is the creek bed?) There isn't much in the way of home-front scenes, but what there is neatly reflects the anxiety and pain of those left behind. The combat scenes are exhausting. A few hundred Americans opposed by some four thousand regulars of the North Vietnamese army. (About the same ratio of Americans to adversaries as General Custer faced, only he had no air support. Custer is brought up several times.)
But, most important, this is the first film I can remember seeing about the Vietnam war in which the enemy is presented as something other than outright evil. There is a good deal of irony in the movie. Mel Gibson prays before the battle. Take us under your wing, and so forth, he asks. Then throws in, "Ignore those pagans praying to a different God." Much later in the film, long enough for us to have forgotten Gibson's racist plea, the commander of the North Vietnamese army is also seen praying -- presumably to the same God. And one of the NV soldiers is humanized to the extent of keeping on his person a diary written to his wife. (The soldier wears glasses so we can tell him from the other North Vietnamese and remember him.) He dies heroically and when the Americans take the diary from his body and flip through it, they find a picture of his wife, a woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to Gibson's wife, played by Madeleine Stowe. We win the battle (Ia Drang) of course, but even this is undercut by irony. The NV commander looks at the piles of bodies after the Americans leave. He shakes his head and says, "What a tragedy." The worst part of it, he muses, is that the Americans will treat this as a victory and the war will go on to its necessary end, although now it will mean just that many more deaths.
Should you bother watching this? I think so. This one would have been a true original if it had appeared twenty years ago.