1968 Tunnel Rats

I never went through boot camp. I've never been in the military. I've certainly never been sent overseas into a war zone.

However, throughout this movie I found myself constantly wondering 'Why are they doing that?' For example: Though it makes for better lighting for the actor-- While crawling around in a tunnel, full of hidden enemies, it doesn't seem like it would take much training to know that shining your flashlight in your face instead of down the tunnel, just doesn't seem very smart.

Not to mention using a flashlight without a red filter(to preserve night vision) seems doubly not that smart.

Or soldiers who have fought tooth and nail to survive, only to stand like they are watching fireworks while bombs land on their heads.

The only movie I can think of that features such inept soldiers is the last Hills Have Eyes 2 remake, but they were just in training, which is where this unit should have been left.

People thought he could never do.. but he did and this is the best film he has made so far.

Uwe Boll the German director who has be come known for the creation of some of the worst films in history. And most of them were video game adaptations.

But maybe Postal was the beginning of a transformation. it wasn't a very good film but at least it had some very good bits. Far cry was better but still not great.

Tunnel Rats is good. though its not that great and still some visible cracks but at least its the cracks are not so wide. the dialogue is still full of problems but the plot is rather good. the action is intense and meaningful.

the film was even very moving at times. I wanted to find problems with the movie but found more good points rather than bad points. which is rare in a Uwe Boll film. many of the characters were still 2 Dimensional but the music,action,plot made up for many of the mistakes.

Some war films about Vietnam show the power of the American army, but this film at least shows the Americans being kicked about which I have only seen in Platoon.

Uwe Boll has made a film and it is not a bad film.

"1968 Tunnel Rats" makes a brutal statement about the horrors of war and pulls no punches. Unlike many Hollywood epics which purport to teach their lessons through clever manipulations of the heart, this is no coming-of-age film or family drama couched in a setting of battle. Writer/director Uwe Boll has created a film which is very simply about the futility of war, in this case, set in the jungles of Vietnam.

North Vietnamese fighters dug tunnels, sometimes hundreds of miles long, in which they hid, lived, and carried out surprise missions against the Americans. After an ambush of several members of his squad, Sergeant Vic Hollowborn (Michael Pare) returns to the area with a ragtag group of Army soldiers to avenge their deaths. These young men, some barely out of high school, walk blindly into a world they've never known.

The ensemble cast does what they need to do -- this is not as much of a character-driven piece as other films of this genre, and the improvised dialogue isn't Hollywood war movie fluff. I've never been in battle but I hope the soldiers in the film are realistically depicted. They certainly aren't romanticized a la "Apocalypse Now." Pare's Sergeant Hollowborn is an effective leader, a man who makes his own rules and expects his men to follow them. Other standouts include Nate Parker as Private Jim Lidford, who thinks his urban roots make him tough enough to breeze through this assignment, and Rocky Marquette as Private Terence Verano, the sweet baby-faced kid who exemplifies what made this particular war so intolerable for American mothers -- he clearly doesn't belong here (not that anybody does). Lidford ought to be back on the basketball court on the corner and Verano ought to be back on the beaches of Lake Michigan. Among the North Vietnamese "enemies," watch for Jane Le as young mother Vo Mai. Her heartwrenching performance will stay with you long after the credits roll.

The look is stark and the action unrelenting. The lighting is subdued -- dark and dirty, much like the jungle landscape and tunnels themselves. Opening credits are accompanied by the Zager & Evans' classic "In the Year 2525," which had me deceptively smiling from the start. Jessica de Rooij's score turns ominous after that and was one of the highlights of the movie. But what stood out the most for me was the camera-work of Mathias Neumann. From the copious use of crane shots, as if we are hiding up in the trees ready to pounce, to the hand-held closeups in the tunnel sequences, there is no relief. Visual effects are topnotch and breathtaking. But with few exceptions, "1968 Tunnel Rats" does not rely on sweeping vistas and long shots of masses of soldiers readying for battle. And it doesn't need to. This is about hand-to-hand combat, literally, and the claustrophobic setting is palpable.

Shot on location in South Africa, Boll put all the actors through a boot camp with actual mercenaries prior to filming. This wasn't a "Hollywood" boot camp, referring to the usual type of training actors go through before a war movie. No, they were trained by men who literally had been out killing just a few days beforehand. Filmmakers, cast, and crew all took this project seriously and it shows.

This film may be difficult to watch but it's too compelling to turn away. There isn't a lot to laugh at, although the characters are well-developed enough that we get to know their hopes and fears. It's also definitely a war movie in the true sense of the genre, with heavy political undertones. But It doesn't try to be all things to all people. "1968 Tunnel Rats" is dark and dirty and about as serious as a film can get. If writer/director Uwe Boll is trying send a message, it comes through loud and clear.

As a Nam vet and former combat infantry squad leader I can tell you this movie was 80% BS. As commented on by others we don't build permanent camps in the middle of the jungle. Camps are built in areas where clear fields of fire can be created so that daylight surprise attacks like the one depicted in the movie cannot happen. There also were no jeeps riding down two tracks in the jungle, for the same obvious reason. There are so many factual errors in this flick like uni's, incorrect armaments, a unit insignia that I've never seen before, etc, etc, etc. The director obviously had no knowledge of what went on in Vietnam and he didn't bother to find out by bringing in a knowledgeable technical consultant. This movie is without question the worst Vietnam era movie ever made and one of the worst war movies of all time. The shame of it is that there is a truly gripping story to be told about guys who volunteered to be tunnel rats in the Nam and this flick failed miserably to tell that story. What's worse is from what I see on this website, far too many of you think this was some kind of representative and half way decent movie. Nothing could be further from the truth. And FYI, there were no 6 foot and 6 foot plus tunnel rats as depicted in the movie. Tunnel rats by necessity were the shortest guys who more approximated the size of the people who built and used the tunnels.

If you're looking for an intricate plot, look elsewhere. If you're looking for feel-good, shoot-em-up action, look elsewhere. If you're looking for the latest sugar-pill rom-com with Sandra Bullock, why are you even reading this? In Uwe Boll's stunning "Tunnel Rats," the increasingly interesting (but still no less maligned) German director has made what essentially amounts to a chronicle of the madness of war told in a confined, claustrophobic, and frighteningly intimate way. The concept and plot (a platoon of American soldiers uncovering underground tunnels built by the Viet Cong to stage ambushes) are one and the same; and the metaphors paralleling confined spaces to the erosion of sanity are strong--hysteria is very viscerally believable here. While the character introductions and subsequent dialogs may strike notes of familiarity to the seasoned connoisseur of cinematic warfare, it's the unfamiliarity of the cast (with Boll regular Michael Pare being the only 'name' actor present) that makes it all stick; the lack of name actors only heightens the suspense, especially after they've earned our sympathy. To see these young men trapped in confined, booby-trapped spaces (with nothing but a revolver and a flashlight) is the stuff of nightmares, even more so than "The Descent" a few years back. The film maintains a bleak, free-form nihilism throughout, its plot (much like the war it's invoking) a jagged sequence of events rather than a simple matter of connect-the-dots conflict resolution. Tough, hypnotic, and refreshingly free of contrived stylistic symbolism, "Tunnel Rats" could very well be Uwe Boll's masterpiece.

7.5 out of 10