GloryofGreece wrote:This podcast is making me want to read up more on the Vietnam War and watch films like "Go Tell the Spartans" and "We Were Soldiers"
Go Tell the Spartans is OK for a low budget film, Burt Lancaster after all,
We Were Soldiers is hot garbage, particularly considering how great the man (Hal Moore) and how seminal the event (Landing Zone X-Ray, Ia Drang 65')
Mel Gibson butchered it, half the movie is pure bullshit, and the other half is badly over acted.
Better time spent on the documentaries, The Ten Thousand Day War, Vietnam: A Television History, and the new Ken Burns one, The Vietnam War.
In terms of Vietnam movies, number one is a tie between
Apocalypse Now Redux and
Platoon, with the caveat that
Apocalypse Now Redux is really just
Heart of Darkness set in Vietnam, but one of the greatest movies ever made bar none, while
Platoon is the best movie actually about the American experience in Vietnam. After that is
Full Metal Jacket Kubrick does Nam, then probably
The Deer Hunter, although I would assert that while
The Deer Hunter is a Micheal Cimino classic Americana film, the Vietnam aspects are not really it's strongest point.
The most realistic Vietnam movie is not actually American, it's an Australian film called
The Odd Angry Shot, not nearly as cinematically spectacular as the Hollywood films, none the less the closest to real life in it's lack of spectacularity.