Ten years too late? (Spoilers--of your dinner!)

Rating: Null/10 (4 March 2002)

By now there's quite a body of film work about Vietnam. It's hard for a new one to avoid the "Been there before" pitfall. Also hard to avoid the political entanglement, although this one tries hard & nearly succeeds. To its great credit it begins with the French getting their butts kicked in the 1950s, we should remember this was not originally our war, we inherited it & strolled in there understanding basically nothing of the local situation, how Ho Chi Minh was a Nationalist more than a Communist & had lived in Brooklyn once & knew a lot about Americans. The first American soldier killed in then-Indochina was in 1945 (his attackers blew up his jeep, thinking he was French) & our involvement pre-dated Eisenhower & Kennedy, let alone LBJ whom we see on the black-&-white TV. Mel Gibson's Colonel Moore is a wonderful character, a student of military & other history & a throwback to the era when officers actually were in front of their troops rather than far behind. I haven't read the book but I imagine much of the character is from the real-life Moore, whom I saw on CNN recently & liked immediately. The combination of religious fervor & military bloodlust with a dollop of wry humor is very real, I saw a lot of that in the army myself--these guys were scary & funny at the same time. And they know when their superiors are being idiots yet they do what they're told the best they can, believing they have to answer to a Higher Authority if they shirk their duty. I was glad that the battle scenes had a somewhat chaotic quality, a "Now what the hell do we do?" aspect. The best scenes were of the stranded platoon, guys thrown together in deep doodoo realizing they were just gonna have to come up with a way to survive, again I was reminded of guys I'd known in the army, maybe not the smartest or noblest guys in the world but made of some pretty stern stuff. And there were certain scenes--here comes the SPOILER part--that people just need to see, like the guy who gets a white-phosphorus grenade ("Willie P," we called that stuff) burning under his skin so the medic has to try to cut part of his face off with a bayonet, or the guy with half his face burned off by napalm & when someone takes hold of his legs to try to carry him, the fried skin slides right off. This has special resonance in the wake of the September 11 horrorshow, remember those burn victims? Or when the helicopter gunship cuts loose---yeah, people get turned into Swiss cheese, that's kinda the point. (The military really only has 2 functions: to kill people & break things.) That's how it is people. We send our young men off to do these horrible things for us, the least we can do is look at it occasionally. Now cinematically, sure the flick has its flaws, e.g. that whole extended telegram sequence was flat & ungainly & had nothing like the unbearable tension of just one telegram scene in "A League of Their Own," & the racial element seemed forced, the young black wife seemed an anachronism with her modern-day "Word-up" 'tude. The Galloway character added nothing in particular, although we know he was there & Barry Pepper's performance is fine, could've been saltier though. But I hope this flick finds an audience, especially currently, as our body count in Afghanistan mounts, we need to remind ourselves war's not just a sound-bite on TV, it's very real & very nasty & death is very permanent & especially when I hear talk like "Let's go take out Saddam Hussein, it'll be a cakewalk," all I can do is groan--well, that's another topic. But bottom line, see the movie--it tells the truth.