Hamburger Hill

Hamburger Hill is all too often compared cruelly (and unfairly) to Oliver Stone's Platoon, a film that predates it by a single year and marked a return to Vietnam by American cinema, almost a decade after Cimino and Coppolla set the bar for celluloid commentary on the conflict. In following Platoon's realistic approach as opposed to the stylised, more artistic nature of these earlier films, as well as Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (another film Hamburger Hill was forced to compete with), John Irvin's film was seen as an inferior copy and is not remembered alongside these aforementioned films as a definitive Vietnam War film.

In truth, Hamburger Hill deserves to stand apart from Platoon as having its own approach and method. Hamburger Hill outstrips any other Vietnam War film in its pursuit of realism, going beyond Stone's fictionalised characters with their spiritual and ideological battles. It tells the true story of the bloody assault on Hill 937, from the perspective of a platoon of mostly new recruits (FNGs or F**king New Guys) lead by a core of experienced troops, headed by Dylan McDermott as the weary but passionate Sergeant Frantz. Irvin spends plenty of time letting us be introduced to the characters, their quirks, their cliques and their internal feuds before letting them see meaningful combat. As the film progresses, so does their relationship to each other and to the war they're fighting.

Hamburger Hill's god is resolutely in the details, and it in these details that most of the film's best moments lie. The little scenes, lines and moments have the air of true anecdotes: often brief, insignificant moments in the larger picture yet they stick in the mind and add up to create a collage of impression. Hamburger Hill is probably the most realistic Vietnam film yet made, and the wealth of details give a sense that this film is the closest we've seen to actually being a soldier in Vietnam. There's none of the involved psychological exploration of a single character like Apocalypse Now, none of Full Metal Jacket's black humour and archly artificial dialogue and none of Platoon's symbolic drama. The most important and impacting moments are always those of the actual conflict: from the headless corpse to the half-filled canteen to the agonising friendly fire scene.

Hamburger Hill is primarily a combat picture, concerned with the ugly vicissitudes of the battlefield and its impact on the people involved, and Irvin captures both the drama and the horror of combat effectively. The combat sequences are never short of either excitement, pathos or intensity. Off the battlefield, the film doesn't have the philosophical meditation that gives Apocalypse Now its enduring resonance, but it is not completely without things to say. The film is utterly anti-war but at the same time pro-soldier: it celebrates the men who fought through the horrific conditions, showing us what they had to deal with, from the anti-war protesters at home who convince a soldier's girlfriend to stop writing to him because it is "immoral" to the faceless Blackjack who conducts the bloodshed from afar and through the simple physical conditions they endured. Irvin's message is that whatever your stance on the conflict, the men there deserve respect, particularly because almost none of them are there to consciously represent any moral or political position.

Hamburger Hill's utilitarian design may prevent it from really being a cinematic classic, but the only chief complaint is that it is dramatically unsatisfying on occasions. The climax, in particular, does not feel suitably impacting compared to the violence that preceded it, and the film simply slows down to an end without any significant flourish. This, ultimately, is a product of its realism: the battle of Hamburger Hill did not have satisfying dramatic structure because it was a real event and Irvin deliberately maintains this reality right to the very end, an admirable gesture. Unfortunately, the director's fulfilment of his own artistic manifesto comes at the sacrifice of audience satisfaction: Hamburger Hill is ultimately too realistic to reach the pinnacle of artistic accomplishment.

This is one of the very best and most realistic movies on the Vietnam War. There is no politicizing angst like "Platoon" and no flights of fantasy and metaphysics like "Full-Metal Jacket" or "Apocalypse Now". Those movies were too full of themselves and their "message" (and Oliver Stone, in particular, sought more to advance his political viewpoints by distortion rather than show realistic combat). These guys in the 101st Airborne were engaged in a brutal, actual battle. From the first ambush scene through each of the assaults on the hill, realism was achieved. The North Vietnamese hiding safe in their bunkers during air-strikes, only to emerge and start shooting and rolling grenades down the hill again on the paratroopers--all real. The conversations among the troops, about what they would do when they got home, what kind of car they would buy, are all typical of what I remember from my year over there in the infantry. There was no pontificating about good and evil as with Oliver Stone's much overrated "Platoon". Most of all, it showed guys trying just to take care of each other, while still carrying on with a meat-grinder of a mission. The actors were all virtually unknown at the time this was made, but acquitted themselves well. This movie was unfortunately underpromoted and slipped virtually unnoticed through the theaters, leaving most of us to catch it in the video stores. I am glad I came across it. If you missed this one, go rent it.

This is an excellent depiction of the insanity that was the war in Viet Nam. My view as a naval officer during a scenic tour of the Mekong near the Cambodian border and the Vietnamese city of Chau Phu, permitted me to be a witness to many, many occasions involving the wholesale abuse of humans by humans. The strain on mind, body and soul takes years (if ever) to repair and this film captures it. There are brief glimpses of this agony in some of the other films mentioned here in the reviews, e.g., Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket and Platoon. Each of these films have merit but are deeply flawed. Apocalypse Now is steeped in moral allegory to the expense of an accurate portrayal of the war; Full Metal Jacket is only 2/3 completed; Platoon becomes a Levi-Straussian moral tale with an arch villain and virtuous hero-- the latter heinously slain by the former with revenge exacted by the weary sojourner on the odyssey. OK. What do we have here with Hamburger Hill? A story? Heroic acts? Action? Not really. What we have is the horror and insanity of war. The film ends on the same pointless note as it began. But, you know what? Reading through the detractors of this film who touted the other potential three and slammed this one, I would not hesitate to bet they were never there. I could glance at the reviews and pick out the vets-- not just on the basis of whether they liked this film or not but of how they reacted to it. I know and know damn well. I too was there, brothers. See this film. It's well produced, directed and the cast is damn good. Check it out.

Unfairly forgotten and left in the slipstream of critical darlings Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill can proudly fly its own worthwhile flag. There's nothing preachy or political here, director John Irvin and writer James Carabatsos approach the subject with a refreshing humane honesty, making us viewers privy to the American soldiers mindset as they cope with life in Vietnam before an assault on some turd pile strategic hill, a battle that the survivors of that particular bloody conflict would call Hamburger Hill.

No matter what one feels about the war, the politics of such etc, the fact that quite often Vietnam films zoom in on the misdemeanours and egotistical sides of the American presence in Vietnam, tends to detract from the bravery of men and boys who were doing the job their government decreed they should do. Hamburger Hill addresses this, proudly so. Pace is deliberate and literate, building up to the assault on Hill 937, with little slices of kinetic action inserted along the way to tantalise and torment in equal measure.

Not all the acting is smart, there's a cast of up and coming thesps on show that features some who have gone on to be "name" actors, while others that were out of their depth subsequently found a level more befitting their abilities. Yet this is also a cunning tactic in the film's favour, no stars needed here, young adult actors without baggage or headlines kind of feels appropriate for this portrayal of soldiers in an alien world, many of whom would lay their shattered bodies down in the mud at Hamburger Hill. 8/10

Extremely brutal and fierce true story about one particular group in the 101 Airborne Division, who spend ten days and eleven battles trying to claim a muddy and well-occupied hill that's dubbed "Hamburger Hill".

The cast in this film were mostly unknown like Dylan McDermott (who made his film debut here) and Steven Weber who both play the platoon's two weary and determined sergeants, Don Cheadle is one of the five new recruits, Michael Boatman and Courtney Vance are also in the cast. It's certainly well-acted by McDermott and Vance..

John Irvin ("The Dogs of War") directed the film and here, he lets the emotions of the soldiers go very far but not too far and the same can be mentioned for the battle scenes. Also, Irvin take a page of Robert Aldrich's WW2 classic and unforgettable melodrama "The Dirty Dozen". Instead of making instant up close shots as Aldrich did, Irvin slowly moves the camera in and it captures the unpredictable feeling that any of the G.I.s have. I wasn't moved, yet I was amazed as well.

Jim Carabatos ("Heartbreak Ridge") wrote the movie's story and like Irvin, Carabatos is careful in making the tale absolutely clear and very understanding to the viewer. The point that Irvin and Carabatos are trying to make is fascinating and simple: No one here is trying to be the hero nor the villain because surviving the war is a more important factor than trying to be gutsy and wind up being killed.

"Hamburger Hill" isn't the type of war movie like Oliver Stone's "Platoon" or Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket" were, but it tends to be like Terrence Malick's "The Thin Red Line" was a few years ago. It's a fierce and very thoughtful film