The Best Vietnam War Movie You've Never Seen
Amending The Record - The Origins & Legacies Of Hamburger Hill
Like Stone with Platoon, Hamburger Hill was a personal story for Carabatsos, who fought as a part of the 1st Air Cavalry Division in Vietnam. While Stone's film wielded a profound sense of righteous anger at the conduct of the United States government and being absorbed into the terror enacted on the Vietnamese people, Hamburger Hill was more anguished and resigned - a lament for the dehumanisation of those who fought in an awful and deeply unpopular war and whose hopes and dreams were extinguished for nought.
Irvin's unshowy and human approach to the subject matter - moulded, perhaps, by the filmmaker's time as a documentary filmmaker in Vietnam - largely sidesteps the sabre-rattling jingoism that defined many of the genre pictures from the Reagan era, save for an unfortunate Philip Glass score, the heroic notes of which form an uncomfortable dissonance as we watch scores of U.S. soldiers die for a mound of viscera-soaked mud.
Still, the end result is anything but hawkish, and is more spiritually in tune with something like Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down than it is Missing in Action or the fatally propagandistic Green Berets, in that its anti-war credentials are punctuated by a pro-soldier bent. Lives are mourned, but never the cause. Instead, space is devoted by Carabatsos and Irvin to the diverse makeup of the conscripted and enlisted soldiers, unpacking racial and social tensions as they come to terms with their enforced expendability, and the prospect that nothing good awaits them if they even manage to survive.
True, these characters are, as the Vietnam Veterans of America described in one blog, "one dimensional" - especially when compared to those found in Platoon - but the sociological makeup acts as a slight counterweight to the film's tropey, monologue-heavy aspects. The cast, comprised of the likes of Dylan McDermott, Courtney B. Vance and Don Cheadle, come from different walks of life - some reluctantly conscripted, and others rueful enlistees. There's also a mixture of battle-hardened characters who've been in-country for a long time and those who are new to the war, as well as that classic genre wrinkle of the out-of-his-depth officer being schooled by their more experienced NCOs.
All part and parcel of the genre, absolutely, but what differentiates Hamburger Hill from its genre cohorts is the specific detail paid to the socio-political dynamics of the squad. We see soldiers confronting racial and class divides along with political existentialism, until eventually all that remains is either death or the camaraderie of survival. Whether it's the conversations between McDermott's Frantz and Steven Weber's Worcester or the use of I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag in the soundtrack, it's made abundantly clear long before the assault on Hill 93 that we're about to witness something cruel and pointless.
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