Some good, a bunch of bad, a dash of schizophrenia

Rating: Null/10 (7 March 2002)

My sense is that this production was rushed to the theaters for obvious reasons. In a previous life, this movie probably wanted to be closer to "a thin red line" more irony, introspection, you can still see parts of this straining through the glop, Mel Gibson's plea to god to "ignore the prayers of those Heathens" was clearly in this mode. The problem is that much of the movie is half-baked, there is no way people get death notices in real time, for example, and some of the scenes were simply made up whole cloth, SPOILER coming, they never did a frontal assault on the enemy using Gatling gun equiped helicopters, why not, well, according to the book, this never happened and at the time, only airplanes carried these weapons, further, we were given the impression that this mythical attack was not planned in conjunction with these mythical machines, which is completely out of character for the colonel. By the way, sadly, the colonel in real life thought he won a victory because they killed lots of Vietnamese and got lots of weapons. A very sorry commentary on the whole war, which was actually represented well in the last moments of the film.