The Best Vietnam War Movie You've Never Seen

The Vietnam War is one of the most dramatised conflicts of the 20th century, second only to World War II in terms of cinematic representations and pop-cultural scrutiny. The legacies of the conflict - particularly as it pertains to the involvement of the United States, which began in the 1950s and concluded with the defeat of South Vietnam in 1975 - are wide and complex, with cinema encapsulating these myriad perspectives and conclusions across multiple decades, the most pivotal of which has to be the 1980s.

If the seventies were about introspection, ambiguity, and reckoning with a volatile body politic and social fabric, then the eighties were the exact opposite. Vulnerability was out, Ronald Reagan was in, and empowerment and victory were the name of the game. This naturally extended to the biggest scar on the national psyche, Vietnam. Suddenly, movies surrounding the conflict went from dark, meditative works on the darkness of human nature like Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter, to instead triumphantly glee revenge flicks about lost prisoners of war, like the Sylvester Stallone-starring First Blood Part II and Behind Enemy Lines. This coincided with a renewed projection of force by the United States military, which intervened in Grenada and Panama across Reagan's two terms as President.

Vietnam, for all intents and purposes, had been compartmentalized and relitigated - a context that motivated the production of three pivotal films set during the conflict, one of which has been somewhat forgotten: John Irvin's Hamburger Hill.

Hamburger Hill occupies a unique space in cinematic representations of the Vietnam War - particularly from that decade. Released in between Stanley Kubrick's scathingly satirical Full Metal Jacket and Oliver Stone's personal and uncompromising Platoon in 1987, Irvin's film has unfortunately been swallowed up by the loftier legacies of its late-eighties siblings, both of which marked a break from previous onscreen depictions of the war, and are heralded as pop-cultural touchstones as a result.

This is despite Hamburger Hill bringing its own unique and indeed valid perspective of Vietnam to the fore. The film, which was praised at the time of its release in theatres for its harrowing combat sequences, was also met with criticism from outlets like the Washington Post for the ostensibly "hawkish, macho posturing" of writer James Carabatsos' script, which depicted a squad of conscripts and wilful enlistees reckoning with a sense of abandonment and futility they felt as they attempted to take the strategically redundant position of Hill 93, a meatgrinder nicknamed by US soldiers who fought in the battle as "Hamburger Hill".

72 Americans were killed in the real-life engagement, with a further 372 being wounded. The fighting lasted for just a week, coming in the month of May, 1969, and the position was abandoned not long after. It came to represent Vietnam in microcosm - military misadventure with no end in sight, with only bodies and wounded to show for it. It's a theme Irvin's film conveys unflinchingly.

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