Again, while the scene is great and well-acted and suspenseful and all that. Maybe, I am wrong about this, I dont know.Ģ. Were flame throwers common weapons in Vietnam? It seem to me to be very strange to have a flame thrower involved in the very first Vietnam scene of the film. But I seem to recall that we are immediately thrown into a scene of De Niro using a flame thrower. I dont remember when/what happens to transition us to the Vietnam part of the film (its been several years since my only viewing of this film). So: an utter dud, as far as I'm concerned.

Of course, a lot of the film's initial success was down to its being the first film to seriously confront the issue of America's involvement in Viet Nam (the live action cartoon that is The Green Berets doesn't count). Streep, it must be said, does an excellent job in creating a character out of nothing. This has a 'distancing' effect on this viewer, who is blinded by the star-power on screen. The men all look far too old to be fighting in Viet Nam.ĪND - when the film was made only one of the leading actors (De Niro) could be classified as a star: he is now a mega-star and Christopher Walken and Meryl Streep aren't far behind. 'Lower middle-class' might be nearer the mark. The main characters are supposed to be 'working class' - to Americans, this might be how they come across: to a European, they look far too well off to belong in that class bracket.

Imo, it's a fairly terrible film and a failure on just about every level.Ĭertain flaws that were not apparent at the time are all too clear now: the dreadful 'underlining' of its message, the laborious 'set up' of the 'first act' before the men land in Viet Nam, the sledgehammer irony (if that's what it is - I'm not sure even Cimino knew) of the survivors' mournful chorus of God Bless America.Īnd the hopelessly protracted (and unnecessary) Russian wedding the first act. I saw it again last week and found it unbelievably mannered, unforgivably prolix and generally fixated on its own portentousness. I first saw it in 1984 and was impressed - although I can recall, even at that young age, that it was possibly over-long. It's hard to remember that it was universally acclaimed as a 'masterpiece' back in 1978.

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