Product Details

• Actors: Tony Billy, Christopher Birt, Georgina Cates, Mike Edward, Larry Gilliard Jr.
• Directors: Thomas Michael Donnelly
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, HiFi Sound, NTSC
• Language: English
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Paramount
• VHS Release Date: April 3, 2001
• Run Time: 111 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6305403368
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #7,538 in Video (See Bestsellers in Video)

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  Video > Military & War > Vietnam War

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great movie based on Tim O'Brien's short story, April 21, 2000

By	Lyndsay Massengill (North Carolina, US) - See all my reviews

I saw this movie months ago and thought it was incredible. I then read Tim O'Brien's short story "Sweatheart of the Song Tra Bong" and realized how well the director and actors preserved the author's own words. I was impressed and intrigued at the same time. For those of you who were wondering where to find this short story, check out The Things They Carried by O'Brien....you'll be even more impressed with the movie!

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Better than the book, January 27, 2006

By	Deborah Duerksen (New York, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Viewers who have critized this film for its "lack of realism" are missing the point: It was never meant to be realistic in the first place. If they had read Viet Nam veteran Tim O'Brien's short story "The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong," from "The Things They Carried," on which the movie is based, they would know that. The story centers around a group of unsupervised young medics stationed on an isolated plateau west of Chu Lai, where they perform the gruesome work of stabilizing the most critical cases choppered in from the battlefields of the early 1970s. One of them flies his girlfriend in from the States, just to prove it can be done. When she responds to jungle combat life in a manner that no one could have predicted, the story takes on an eerie, supernatural quality that transports it out of the realm of "realia." This is in fact one production that manages to exploit the film medium to match and even far surpass the intended effect of the literary work on which it's based, largely because the author (perhaps because he himself was uncomfortable with the material???) using the literary convention of the "story-within-a-story," constantly interrupts the narrative flow in order to call the veracity of the storyteller into question. Although the filmed version retains the outer story and uses it quite effectively, it succeeds where the book failed in conveying a believable, if disturbing, transformation of character where the girlfriend is concerned. Rather than serving as a sober answer to the question as to whether or not suitability for combat is determined more by individual personality than by gender, this is instead a war story turned gothic, which makes the point that collective guilt is often one of the ingredients of legend.

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful renditioning of a quite scary story, March 8, 2001

By	Beowulf (Fort Collins, CO USA) - See all my reviews

I couldn't believe that they actually made this when I first saw it on Showtime this past April. I'm glad I recorded it too, because this was one of the most heart-felt Vietnam stories I've ever seen and read. Almost as stunning as "Apocalypse Now" but not nearly as disturbing. The casting was perfect for every single role. I thought Kiefer Sutherland was the best of all of them. The girl, Georgina Cates, did a hauntingly spectacular job as Marianne.