Attention all posters! I need your help to resolve a disagreement.......

Wah hunnah dollah too beaucoup! Figh dollah!

Excuse me? The film was showing soldiers during leisure time. It may be hard to believe, but soldiers do not fight 24/7. Not all of Vietnam was at war, either. It was all civilians and soldiers. HOWEVER. This was still a Vietnam movie. The entire movie was not about the battlefield.

JBR-
There was more than one perspective on the Vietnam war. Yes, most were set in the heart of battle, and most Vietnam War movies portray this part of the war. But there was another side of the war. What about the cities that went untouched? The people just went on living their normal lives.
Barry Levinson saw the other side of Vietnam that wasn't "dirty, chaotic, [or]frightening." The "dirty, chaotic, frightening pieces of work" show the Vietnamese people as the constant enemy or the repressed victim and in this case, Levinson opted to portray them as real human beings who lead normal lives in Vietnam with families, friends, and jobs. It doesn't mean that Levinson was wrong in portraying them in this way and that he was wrong in portraying them this way during a Vietnam War film, it just means that Levinson told the truth and showed the audience the other side of Vietnam, one that most audiences haven't ever seen in Vietnam movies.

"In short, it shows a director with an almost complete disregard for the realism of the situation he was trying to present, instead settling on a cardboard facsimile of what must have been a dirty, dangerous, and unhappy place."
Your statement is completely incorrect in that Levinson did indeed show the realism of the situation in Vietnam. He didn't show ALL of the situation because unlike Platoon, people weren't trudging through the deepest parts of the jungle shooting at the enemy every 5 minutes. But what he did show was definitely realistic.

No doubt about it, this film was definitely a Vietnam Movie.

Thanks,
amanda

I would also posit that it is a Vietnam movie in that the story would not work if it was set in another time or place. "M*A*S*H" notwithstanding, Vietnam was the first time that the majority of troops (and we as a nation) began to question the wisdom of our leaders and the 'validity' of the conflict we put our lives on the line for. Cronauer's rebellion -- playing rock n roll, telling jokes, actually HAVING FUN on Armed Forces Radio -- may be a drop in the bucket by comparison, but it would have been a joke in a WWII setting, and old hat by the time of Desert Storm. Cronauer (the character, not necessarily the real guy) saw the folly of his superiors in trying to toe the line of saying and playing certain material when he knew better what the soldiers wanted (and mentally needed) to hear. On a grander scale, people back in the States saw through the joke the whole Vietnam situation had become and began to fight back. You could film 'Three Kings' as soldiers hoping to loot Nazi holdings and it would work; you could also make 'From Here to Eternity' a Gulf War love story. But GMV, whether it shows what Vietnam was 'really like' or not, is most definitely a Vietnam story.

A Deejay who tries to pacify troops? Did we watch the same film? A great deal of Cronauer's struggles are in trying to present the real news to the soldiers, the things that the higher ups don't want anyone to know because they might not look so good.

Also, why must a war movie be only dirty, chaotic and frightening? You can't place those kind of limitations on any form of art. War is not black and white. People involved in wars are not all soldiers, and there is a great need for people who can look after the interests of those who are soldiers, even their entertainment needs. Everyone needs to be entertained now and again. Not to say that war is fun and games, as it certainly isn't, but it has always been regarded as important to keep up a soldier's morale, and that is just what Adrien did. The topic and setting of the film may not have been what you enjoy or imagine as a war film, but it unquestionably dealt with social, moral and emotional aspects of war often disregarded. Yes, this is a movie focusing on people rather than battles, but that by no means disqualifies it.

Here's looking at you, kid.

The bombing of Jimmy's bar is NOT dirty, chaotic or frightening????

The guys sitting around on Jeeps doing nothing are off duty. This is set in downtown Saigon, for goodness sake, not out in the main combat theatre. This is what soldiers hanging out in the city look like. The guys on the patrol boats and in the trucks have their hands poised on their weapons. There isn't non-stop shooting, is THAT why this is not a war movie? The truth is that in Saigon, there wasn't non-stop shooting like out in the jungle, but the potential for violence was always at hand. For that matter, even in the jungle the fighting was not nonstop. This is how war works, extended periods of boredom and uselessness interrupted by periods of sheer panic.

As for transporting the characters to a Roman battlefield, well, any good war movie can have its story line transferred to another time and place and still work. In fact, Apocalypse Now had its story transferred TO Vietnam from another time and place (in an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's novel) so I guess that's a case of character and story over setting, so you better delete that from the list of "real" Vietnam movies. There is a name for movies where the setting is over and above character and story: a travelogue!

It shows Vietnamese speaking English? One can only hope that those who are attending school to learn English would actually do so! And I didn't see the rest of Trinh's family and village speaking English.

Complete disregard for realism? Carboard facsimile? Did you SEE the scenes in the city? In the village? It is what it is, not what it "must have been." How would you know how "dirty, dangerous, and unhappy" it was?

What do you want, the story of Adrian the infantryman, in fierce combat in the jungle, complete with him being Medevac'd out?

I guess Jarhead is not an Iraq movie because Swoff doesn't get to shoot any enemy combatants.

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