Post by Eλευθερί on May 16, 2021 12:30:54 GMT
One of Donald Pleasence's last films.
A dramatic telling of the last major battle between the French and the Vietnamese revolutionary forces in the First Indochina War. The humiliating defeat in the battle led France to end the eight-year-long war and begin to withdraw from Southeast Asia shortly afterward. Pleasence plays a British-American war correspondent who sends dispatches about the daily developments back to the US. The film passes back and forth between the battlefields, French military strategists, and denizens of the nearby city as they tried to predict who would win and how long it will take.
A number of the reviews note that the film was produced with the cooperation of the French and the Vietnamese military, but the story is told almost entirely from the French perspective (French meaning French soldiers and a handful of Vietnamese supporters of the French). The music is dramatically sad and tragic as the French soldiers realize they are being beaten. The camera follows French soldiers as they parachute into battle and beg for reinforcements in the mud of the trenches; their Vietnamese opponents are almost never seen or heard from until almost the very end of the film. That's not to imply that there's something wrong with telling a war story from the perspective of one side (that's how almost all war films work), it's just to point out that the "cooperation of the Vietnamese armed forces" in the production shouldn't be taken to mean that the Vietnamese side's perspective was presented in the film in any meaningful way.
While I appreciated the work that went into producing this film, recreating the aura of 1950s Vietnam for the scenes set in the city and epic battlefield scenes in the hills of Dien Bien Phu, the dialogue didn't seem realistic. So much talk from some of the characters of high-minded principles like honor; it made it feel in someways almost like a stage play dressed up with the rain, mud, explosions, and blood effects of film. For that reason, I find the more gritty approaches taken in films like Hamburger Hill and the miniseries The Pacific much more compelling.
6/10
A dramatic telling of the last major battle between the French and the Vietnamese revolutionary forces in the First Indochina War. The humiliating defeat in the battle led France to end the eight-year-long war and begin to withdraw from Southeast Asia shortly afterward. Pleasence plays a British-American war correspondent who sends dispatches about the daily developments back to the US. The film passes back and forth between the battlefields, French military strategists, and denizens of the nearby city as they tried to predict who would win and how long it will take.
A number of the reviews note that the film was produced with the cooperation of the French and the Vietnamese military, but the story is told almost entirely from the French perspective (French meaning French soldiers and a handful of Vietnamese supporters of the French). The music is dramatically sad and tragic as the French soldiers realize they are being beaten. The camera follows French soldiers as they parachute into battle and beg for reinforcements in the mud of the trenches; their Vietnamese opponents are almost never seen or heard from until almost the very end of the film. That's not to imply that there's something wrong with telling a war story from the perspective of one side (that's how almost all war films work), it's just to point out that the "cooperation of the Vietnamese armed forces" in the production shouldn't be taken to mean that the Vietnamese side's perspective was presented in the film in any meaningful way.
While I appreciated the work that went into producing this film, recreating the aura of 1950s Vietnam for the scenes set in the city and epic battlefield scenes in the hills of Dien Bien Phu, the dialogue didn't seem realistic. So much talk from some of the characters of high-minded principles like honor; it made it feel in someways almost like a stage play dressed up with the rain, mud, explosions, and blood effects of film. For that reason, I find the more gritty approaches taken in films like Hamburger Hill and the miniseries The Pacific much more compelling.
6/10