Valid points, all.
Read the book, “We Were Soldiers Once, And Young.” The movie is pretty damn (reasonably) close to the book, which might as well have been a transcript of the actual events. Which, by the way, were an almost exact replication of the slaughter of the French in the same location years prior to the US forces, who only had the added benefit of the newly formed Air Cav.
I never got the love for Apocalypse Now. It is not a bad movie perse, but it is very cartoonish. The insane Colonel Kurtz. The crazy colonel who loved surfing, who said “I love the smell of Napalm in the morning!” (A phrase which has spawned millions of annoying unoriginal people to spawn that stupid cliche, usually switching napalm for money, success, farts, my woman, eggs, etc.) Dennis Hopper as another crazy dude (which was pretty easy for him, since Hopper was more or less a crazy drunken, dope feen back in the day). The goofballs on the boat that ran the Martin Sheen character upriver. They sent Martin Sheen into the jungle rather than Harrison Ford. Wouldn’t Indiana Jones have more fun in Cambodia chasing drugged out mad Colonels?
Like I said, not a bad movie, but somewhat a silly one. I can’t take Marlon Brando seriously as a military man, even one that went nuts and ran off into the jungle. (Marlon did more or less the same thing in his old age)
I think people love this movie because of the title APOCOLYPSE NOW. That is a badass title.
Posting for my father-in-law: MASH. Yes, we all know it is supposed to be in Korea, but it was released during Vietnam and in many represented Vietnam. He was a draftee doctor who hated the Army (and still does to this day), and he said that MASH captured a lot of the mentality of the docs in Vietnam.
I’m amazed you forgot Born on the Fourth of July. But I’m unsurprised you also missed my pick, The Odd Angry Shot.
I came in to vote for Full Metal jacket but voted for Apocalypse Now. Apocalypse strips the BS of war a layer at a time til it reveals the core. After all the BS, it is about people shooting each other for reasons they can not understand, or don’t matter. When he asks, who is in charge, they respond" you are’ .You or nobody. It is not about plans and leadership. It is about killing for because you were sent and trained to. All you want to do is survive and hopefully keep your fellow soldiers alive.
What we really need – at least, what hasn’t been done yet – is a big-budget Hollywood production that tells the story of the war from the Vietnamese POV, with Americans as marginal characters.
I’m sure Vietnam has its own film industry these days, and I’m sure it must have produced some Vietnam War movies. The plot of one those could simply be adapted – downplaying any Communist agitprop, and perhaps portraying the ARVN more sympathetically than the original, but definitely leaving the Americans marginal.
Because – remember whose war this was. Theirs. The Vietnamese. It was a prolonged civil war – with foreign intervention, but that is not unusual in civil wars. It’s their story, and if it’s all such an important story for Americans, then it should be told to us their way for once.
You also missed GO TELL THE SPARTANS, DEAD PRESIDENTS, DIEN BIEN PHU… And isn’t THE KILLING FIELDS really about Cambodia, not Vietnam?