I totally disagree with that interpretation of Full Metal Jacket. I found it to be really hackneyed - there was nothing surprising, nothing we haven’t seen a million times (and don’t tell me it was fresh when it came out, either) - the Vietnam part of the movie seemed like a loose collection of some good ideas for scenes that never actually developed. In other words, there’d be a great image or the start of a good thought, and then it just dies on the vine. (Like, that shot where we as the viewer watch the camera crew watching the real fighters? Fantastic. But then it devolves into cliche almost immediately and has nothing fresh to show me.)
When I watch a Kubrick movie I want to be surprised. I wasn’t.
ETA - I added in The Killing Fields because I thought maybe somebody would want to talk about it in reference to the other ones, is all.
“Sergeant, sergeant, “Loyce’s my name”
Took the job 'cause he’s insane.
“Sergeant stripes they give me class.”
He just likes to kick our ass.”
eta: FMJ sucked, just like every movie Kubrick made after 1980.
The Fog of War is the best so far. One of the great documentaries, and really says everything the other movies did about the war.
For a fiction film, I’d pick Apocalypse Now, but metaphor, no matter how good, is no substitute for seeing the war though the eyes of the man who was involved in managing it.
Full disclosure: I was not in the Vietnam war, so I don’t know which is a better depiction of the actual war.
The better film is Platoon. It has no caricatures - every character in that film is someone you might meet in real life. It’s also incredibly well shot, scripted and paced.
Apocalypse Now had some of the above, but not all. Apocalypse Now was, for me, a film that could have told the same story, but been set in WW2, or even on a different planet. (Well, it was based on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, set in Africa, wasn’t it).
Caveat - I don’t know much about film or storytelling.
That was my take too. And the infamous drill instructor was the stereotyped rough boot camp Sargent written with R-rated dialog. Tabasco sauce on yesterday’s cold hamburger.
I dunno. Its hard to picture Apocalypse Now taking place in an American War that wasn’t Vietnam. It wasn’t set in realisitic depiction of the war, but it was still about the war.
If I want to learn factual information about the Vietnam war I’ll watch a documentary.
I picked Platoon, because it was the one movie in the list that is most *about *being a soldier in Viet Nam – not like I know shit about that, but from the books I’ve read about it, it seemed fairly spot-on. Most of the others were about something else (loss, morality, insanity, violense, jingoism, etc) that used Viet Nam as a back drop.
Look at Apocolypse Now a great movie, to be sure, but it’s basically *Heart of Darkness *just set in Viet Nam.
Hamburger Hill is another in the “about being there” vein, but it’s not half the film that *Platoon *is.
Nonsense. R Lee has become the very DEFINITION of the stereotypical hard core drill instructor. The big difference IMHO between Gunnary Sergeant Hartman and every other hard core film drill instructors (including Gunnery Sergeant Foley from An Officer and A Gentleman, and Gunnery Sergeant Highway from Heartbreak Ridge) is that Hartman is not there to dispense “tough love” or “help these men reach deep inside themselves”. He isn’t even portrayed as human. Sergeant Hartman is the institutionalized dehumanizing (a common Kubrick theme) face of the Marine Corps. He is there to grind those maggots into Marines or grind them out if they can’t hack it. A mechanism, part of a larger machine.
His death at the hands of Private Pyle is significant in that a) it does nothing to change the operation of the military machine and b) it is indicative of how the stresses of the Vietnam war are slowing wearing away and damaging that machine. One would presume no focus group or JAG investigator would have looked into the incident in any real depth. It would have been noted, a replacement DI issued and a new batch of recruits sent through. Much like reparing the damage caused by a blown piston in an engine.
Anyhow, I still go with FMJ as the greatest Nam film, if not one of the greatest war films of all time.
I will say though that the assult on the VC village by Lt Col Kilgore and his 1/9th Air Cav squadron in Apocalypse Now is one of the greatest battle sequences ever filmed.
Hamburger Hill isn’t a bad film, but it’s more about the actors than it is about the war. I didn’t choose a favorite, as I had the actual experience of being there. I like most of the films listed, and some are more accurate than others, but in the end they’re all just entertainment or statements of the filmmakers ideologies.
On accuracy, my Dad did two tours in Nam as a helicopter crew chief in the core. He always told me that the boot camp portion of Full Metal Jacket was a crock and the Vietnam portion of FMJ was the most accurate he has seen in a movie.
To me, there are only 2 1/2 really good films of the American experience in Vietnam: Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now (the original cut, not the later padded-out version) and (as the 1/2) The Deer Hunter.
I gave the nod to FMJ for being the more concise of the top two; The Deer Hunter has a flock of great scenes but is a bit too unrealistic for me (yeah, I know Apocaplyse Now ain’t exactly documentary either).
Platoon I’ve never cared for much, probably due to the unpleasant sensation of being struck repeatedly over the head by Stone’s thunderingly obvious symbolism.
Not sure if any such thing exists, but just as with some of the recent films from the German perspective of WWII, it would be interesting to see a Vietnamese take on their own conflict and the US presence therein.
I voted for The Fog Of War. It’s simply too insightful, too fraught with real meaning and consequences, not to stand out above the others, IMO.
But for ficton, Full Metal Jacket is either at or near the top of the list, both for Vietnam films and for war films in general. (Thus far, I find myself in agreement with msmith537’s assessment of the films content and themes.)
And this is why I voted for it, with We Were Soldiers a close second. Hamburger Hill to me really struck a chord over the futility of the war, represented by Hill 937, its relative strategic unimportance, the heavy price paid in lives to claim it, only to have it abandoned thereafter. The action and the redundancy of assaults on the hill as portrayed by the actors did a great job slamming home the sense of numbed despair those guys must have felt in real life.
I loved Hamburger Hill too, but cinematically, I don’t think it can carry *Platoon’s *rucksack. I can’t put my finger on it, but it sort of … looks … like a cut-rate version of a movie. I can’t say I was too thrilled with some of the acting of the troops - apart from a few, actors I’d never seen before and haven’t seen since … and with good reason, it seems. Courtney B. Vance, while a very charismatic and compelling actor, seemed especially way over the top for me.
And while I’m forcing my opinions on everyone else, I personally hated We Were Soldiers. That one seemed to me to be nothing more than an America, Fuck Yeah movie with very little -or at least glossed over- introspection.
The production values of Platoon were certainly glossier and overall better in every way, but somehow the grittiness of HH is enhanced for me by the lower-end production. Platoon is a good movie, but to me its a little too slick, and the whole Elias versus Barnes thing is just too over the top. And Charlie Sheen is a terrible actor. Kinda ruins the whole thing for me when your lead can’t act his way out of a paper (body) bag.
As far as We Were Soldiers is concerned, yeah, I can see your point (Gibson’s speech) but I don’t think the whole movie is all “rah-rah”. Talking to a number of vets at the local legion and they pretty much are in consensus that its a pretty accurate portrayal, as far as these Hollywood war depictions go.
