If you're watching this movie with someone, and his or her eyes start to mist over, edge away slowly

Rating: 4/10 (15 August 2002)

This is a Coca-Cola ad of a film. It's about nothing, it affirms nothing, it denies nothing, it scarcely even hints at anything; the pointlessness of all the footage, considered as a whole, is as mystifying as the footage of a skydiver jumping out of a plane on a surfboard and then drinking Coca-Cola when he lands. Yet one is somehow left with the distinct impression that an attempt has been made to persuade one of something. Meaningless Coca-Cola ads are obviously - don't ask me what makes them so, or why it's obvious - "for" rather than against Coca-Cola; this apparently pointless film is clearly "for" rather than against the American armed forces. Perhaps it's the air of leaden reverence. Perhaps it's the rat-a-tat-a-tat drums. Don't ask me what it is, and don't try to deny it, either.
Here's what happens. It's 1965. The American forces land, are pointed towards a segment of the Vietnamese army and ordered to destroy it - i.e., kill as many of the people in it as possible. The Vietnamese army seems (we're never told in detail) to have exactly the opposite goal: to avoid being killed, and to kill as many of the invaders as possible. That's it. That's ALL the context we're given. It's like watching the world's largest game of Skirmish, but without any rules. To be sure, soldiers on both sides appear to be meeting with some success: a great many people die; the Vietnamese whose country is being invaded, cleanly and off-screen and with a minimum of fuss; the US soldiers, in all manner of creatively gory ways (the makeup and special effects artists seem to have had the time of their lives, finding new ways to show people dying). By the end of the battle we've seen so much War Movie Stuff - trite platitudes, bone-headed "inspirational" speeches, gore, bullets, bombs, mawkish death scenes, Goddammits - that we could easily fail to notice that we're never told what happened overall, let alone why.
Before and after and in between all this senseless battle we see women on the home front; in one memorably bad scene, everyone sits around in a big circle looking uncomfortable, as though nobody can remember which actress is supposed to be playing which character, and acutely aware that it doesn't matter. These women have little to do with the rest of the movie. They're there as if because of "equal time" legislation. The same could be said of the cut-aways to the Vietnamese (who ought, by rights, to have been the centre-stage heroes), whom Wallace trots before the camera as though discharging a poorly understood duty that he'd like to get out of the way quickly.
The ostensible hero, Colonel Moore, comes across as a grade-A prat; never in his entire screen career has Mel Gibson been so devoid of charm or discernible intelligence. Perhaps his most buffoonish hour comes when he delivers the inspirational speech to the poor soldiers who are about to head off to a bloodbath on the other side of the world, where they'll kill and be killed in the service of... Well, he can't say what it's in the service of, so he says something unrelated which he imagines is stirring: "Some of you will die. I can't promise you that you'll make it back alive. But I can promise this: I will leave no-one behind. Dead or alive, we will all come back." This doesn't happen, of course, which is just as well. (Imagine if Moore REALLY had to retrieve all the dead bodies, including those which fell into enemy-controlled ravines and those which nobody could locate.) But the insult lies in offering this as something a condemned man would want to hear. Surely some of the soldiers were standing there thinking: If I get killed in battle, BIG DEAL if my corpse has a seat reserved on the flight back.