It started off well...a stellar cast in a film that examined the side of the army not off in the wilds of Vietnam, and the battles their close friends and families go through. Then it got preachy and devolved into a melodramatic and predictable schlock-fest that made me grit my teeth and try to convince myself that I'm not really American (my birth certificate still says Bloomington, IA so obviously it's not working...)
The ending was the biggest problem. Aside from the fact that the opening scene basically told me exactly what was going to happen (and not in a mysterious or interesting way. More of a blunt and pointless way), the ending was WAY too long and sob-filled. (Continuity check: in the beginning a bagpiper plays at the funeral, in the end suddenly the piper is a bugler playing Taps. How cheezy is *that*???) Also, the editing was shoddy, especially the war clips which were overly detached and didn't at all give a sense of the war as anything more than a news clip. The personal and emotional side of it is lost, and that's the side that's supposed to be explored. So caught up in the glory and demoralization, the film loses the family aspect (example: Mary Stuart Masterson plays a cardboard and generic character. She should have a *much* larger role in the film, as the suffering army wife/child but instead is involved purely in the gut-wrench scenes and little else. Angelica Huston's character hints at the conflict between pride for one's country and disgust at the uselessness of it all. Her love for Hazard vs her hatred for what he represents is never really played out properly and she ends up coming off as cheezy and melodramatic).
Also, the I wish I was Charlie Sheen in Platoon act that D.B. Sweeney was aiming for just didn't work. He was often too abrasive and half the time he sounded as if he was reading his lines from cue cards. He shouted lines consistently and his elocution and poise were awkward. And those letters were horrid, they didn't have the effect that the Platoon letters (Taylor to Grandma) had as the effect was lost. Just words with no sense of where they were coming from. This whole movie felt much too detached...in the same way that Apocalypse Now was detached, but in this film there was nothing to back it up...unlike Apocalypse Now, this film isn't *supposed* to be detached. Perhaps detached from the *war* but not from the *soldiers*.
James Caan and James Earl Jones saved this film from utter disrepair. The only characters that really had *oomph* to them. They were the only characters that had character (Jones especially). And save for the couple of scenes that were utterly pointless (like the maneuvers scene) the scenes with them in them were the ones that stole the show. They made this film a hell of a lot better than it deserves to be (kind of like what Charles Dutton did to Alien 3...or what Morgan Freeman did for Kiss the Girls...) And James Earl Jones is especially good, because, as always, he plays a character that is *very* different from what would be expected from him. He's truly one of the few diverse character actors around ('To the guys like us...Damn few left!!')
Look for an unfortunately small role by Laurence Fishburne (reminiscent of Apocalypse Now...) and a *very* young Elias Koteas, and even *younger* Casey Siemazsko.
Overall: The potential was there, but, as always, Coppola is a very up and down director, and this is not one of his better efforts. Enjoy Jones and Caan, though, they're worth watching if nothing else. Just try not to yawn too loudly through the mandatory proud American army propaganda sob-scenes...5/10.
The ending was the biggest problem. Aside from the fact that the opening scene basically told me exactly what was going to happen (and not in a mysterious or interesting way. More of a blunt and pointless way), the ending was WAY too long and sob-filled. (Continuity check: in the beginning a bagpiper plays at the funeral, in the end suddenly the piper is a bugler playing Taps. How cheezy is *that*???) Also, the editing was shoddy, especially the war clips which were overly detached and didn't at all give a sense of the war as anything more than a news clip. The personal and emotional side of it is lost, and that's the side that's supposed to be explored. So caught up in the glory and demoralization, the film loses the family aspect (example: Mary Stuart Masterson plays a cardboard and generic character. She should have a *much* larger role in the film, as the suffering army wife/child but instead is involved purely in the gut-wrench scenes and little else. Angelica Huston's character hints at the conflict between pride for one's country and disgust at the uselessness of it all. Her love for Hazard vs her hatred for what he represents is never really played out properly and she ends up coming off as cheezy and melodramatic).
Also, the I wish I was Charlie Sheen in Platoon act that D.B. Sweeney was aiming for just didn't work. He was often too abrasive and half the time he sounded as if he was reading his lines from cue cards. He shouted lines consistently and his elocution and poise were awkward. And those letters were horrid, they didn't have the effect that the Platoon letters (Taylor to Grandma) had as the effect was lost. Just words with no sense of where they were coming from. This whole movie felt much too detached...in the same way that Apocalypse Now was detached, but in this film there was nothing to back it up...unlike Apocalypse Now, this film isn't *supposed* to be detached. Perhaps detached from the *war* but not from the *soldiers*.
James Caan and James Earl Jones saved this film from utter disrepair. The only characters that really had *oomph* to them. They were the only characters that had character (Jones especially). And save for the couple of scenes that were utterly pointless (like the maneuvers scene) the scenes with them in them were the ones that stole the show. They made this film a hell of a lot better than it deserves to be (kind of like what Charles Dutton did to Alien 3...or what Morgan Freeman did for Kiss the Girls...) And James Earl Jones is especially good, because, as always, he plays a character that is *very* different from what would be expected from him. He's truly one of the few diverse character actors around ('To the guys like us...Damn few left!!')
Look for an unfortunately small role by Laurence Fishburne (reminiscent of Apocalypse Now...) and a *very* young Elias Koteas, and even *younger* Casey Siemazsko.
Overall: The potential was there, but, as always, Coppola is a very up and down director, and this is not one of his better efforts. Enjoy Jones and Caan, though, they're worth watching if nothing else. Just try not to yawn too loudly through the mandatory proud American army propaganda sob-scenes...5/10.