Product: Casualties of War [UMD for PSP] (1989)
Rating: 5.0
The Greatest War Film of the Last Decade
Along with Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, Casualties of War is one of the finest films about the Vietnam war. It should not, however, be viewed in the format available on VHS cassette, which is panned and scanned (at times, half of the image is missing). Like all De Palma films, it ideally should be viewed in a theater on a huge screen with stereo sound in order to achieve its full, emotionally draining, and audio-visually stunning impact. Since that opportunity won't come very soon for most people, wait until it comes out on DVD, at least so that you can get the letterboxed image and digital sound. Fox, Penn, Leguizamo, Reilly and the rest of the cast give memorable, at times haunting performances. Morricone's thoughtful score is exquisitely, operatically dramatic. And De Palma, muting some of his more baroque techniques, neverthless continues to explore his recurrent thematic concerns, pushing them to their logical conclusions in a war genre that is new to him only in environment if not in spirit (most of his films are about violent atrocities perpetrated by men). The film failed at the box office when it was released in theaters, probably because it disturbed audiences who wanted a friendlier vision of Vietnam, in which American soldiers were at least martyrs, if not heroes (such as Platoon, Born on the 4th of July, Coming Home, and the like). Other viewers complained that De Palma made his film too late in the Vietnam cycle, that his film retold a too familiar story. But this criticism is actually one of the film's merits and intentions: the first act travels the conventions of earlier Vietnam films that had become cliches (the Audy Murphy heroics, the wise black grunt, the male bonding of the platoon, and so on), only to explode them (and thus disrupt many of the viewer's expectations and foil their pleasure). Instead, De Palma turns to the horror of the rape in the second act as new ground other films had been too timid to cover. There are scenes in this portion that moved me to tears of horror and pity. While the third and last act is somewhat schematic, it provides the necessary moral weight for what precedes it. And the ending suggests that the nightmare of Vietnam, rather than absolved (a misreading on the part of many critics), has been imported back to San Francisco where images such as palm trees and young Asian women will forever trigger flashbacks of despair. For those who feel De Palma is incapable of such emotion, this film puts that misconception to rest.