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.
