good flick

Rating: 7/10 (3 March 2002)

this movie was incredibly graphic. I really thought it was well made. It grabbed your attention with it's intense surreal battle scenes. However, this film is not without it's flaws. Namely, the biggest flaw is when they interrupt the grim intense and surreal battle scenes to cut to the reactions of the wives getting their telegrams about their dead. Who cares? As if they could get these telegrams out so fast that it could happen at the same time. Basically every single scene with the wives of the soldiers in it, every single scene, was worthless and could have been cut from the movie as it only constituted about ten mintues of film. It was very distracting.
On the other hand, the characters, basically all of them, were very one dimensional. I didn't find this so distracting as the wife thing, but it bears mentioning. Hal Moore (Gibson)is the model person, it is almost ridiculous, but fortunately for the movie his shallowness is only contained in the first few minutes of the film. Once the action moves to Ia Dang, Gibson brings remarkable depth to an unremarkable character.
Aside from the lack of depth, the obligatory wife scenes, and anything that has to do with chris klein, this movie was great. I take a point of for each infraction, 7/10.