01. This probably won’t ever make anyone’s Top Ten Vietnam Movies list, but it was pretty decent. I thought the first bit was kind of slow going, but it picked up once he was taken prisoner.
02. Christian Bale is great. That is all.
03. This movie was disturbingly funny in that way where the lines are most certainly not funny as they’re written on the page but they become absolutely hysterical because of the way the actors deliver them. When Dwayne was giving Dieter the low down on all the prison guards and when Dieter looked at the guy who kept dancing all the time and said “What’s his problem?” I nearly died laughing. I mean, unless you’ve seen the movie, this line sounds pretty unfunny, but just the way Christian Bale said it totally made it the best line in the entire movie.
04. The first half of this movie is Vietnam meets The Shawshank Redemption, minus the posters of Raquel Welch but with extra scheming about escape routes. The second half is Vietnam meets Die Hard, minus German terrorists who read Time magazine but with extra running around on uneven ground in bare feet.
05. The ending was really, really freaking random. If they had ended it after he inevitably got rescued by helicopter, I would have been satisfied. Instead they rescue him, send him to a military hospital where he gets questioned by the CIA about his classified mission that went awry, and then his buddies kidnap him by hiding him under a cake cart so that they can smuggle him back to their aircraft carrier — thus allowing him to avoid his being sent to Guam to be debriefed — where he is greeted by the population of a small town celebrating his heroism. Then they make him make a speech and he utters a bunch of random things that are probably profound and poetic but more likely to be the ramblings of a man who went slightly crazy in the jungle. It’s like… okay, this was completely unnecessary.
06. If you were from Eugene, Oregon would you name your son … Eugene? I hope for his sake that his family moved there after he was born.
07. I really liked the body language between Dwayne and Dieter in this movie. You always see these guys in Vietnam movies carrying their buddies away from the firestorm, one arm slung across their shoulders, propping them up; that’s the standard “you’re mildly injured and I’m going to drag your ass back to base camp” move. But the way Dwayne and Dieter responded to each other physically as they were on the run and quickly deteriorating both mentally and physically was really quite refreshing; there was a lot of desperate clinging, a lot of genuinely tender (non-sexual) touch. It wasn’t the sort of epic body language you see in other movies.
08. Actually, that’s one thing I liked about this film: it was very natural. The humour, the movement, everything. Sometimes I think movies of this sort can get too bogged down in the codification of symbols generated by the dozens (even hundreds) of movies of a similar sort that came before it, but this one really seemed to escape the same sorts of things you see over and over in movies about the Vietnam war.
09. I think I prefer Vietnam spelled as one word rather than two. Also, despite not being from the American South, I say Vietnam (rhymes with spam) rather than Vietnam (rhymes with mom). This is what happens when you’re fourteen and your favourite movie is Forrest Gump.