Leofwine_draca HAMBURGER HILL is one of those guys-on-a-mission movies that details the life and death of a squad of soldiers assigned with capturing the notorious hill of the title during the Vietnam War. Unlike the other classic Vietnam films of the decade, like Oliver Stone's PLATOON, this one is rarely heard about today which is a shame as it's one of the very best. The whole point of this film is just to 'show how it is', so those looking for deep story lines or character arcs should go elsewhere. In essence, we see a bunch of guys battling it out in horrendous conditions and arguing, fighting and bonding at other times. It's one of the most realistic Vietnam films out there and also one of the grittiest.As with the real war, death is just around the corner in this film and many of the young soldiers have no idea what's coming. The action sequences are quite sporadic until the extended climax, which really is hellish to watch. The bloodshed is shown in unflinching detail in a style that reminded me of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN: no glamorisation here, just bodies being mown down by machine guns and limbs being blown off. It's hard to take, but then that's how it was.The cast members are fine and it's unsurprising that many went on to find further careers in Tinseltown. Dylan McDermott, Courtney B. Vance. and Steven Weber are the ones I singled out for special mention, as they have probably the best characterisation here, but nobody puts a foot wrong. Some of the most moving parts are those where the soldiers talk about the negative reaction they face back home in the US, which makes you really feel for their plight. This is a worthy story of forgotten men in a dirty war and the hell on earth they faced there.

Ersbel Oraph Somebody wanted to do a film about the War in Vietnam. Why? Because there are so many of them. Enough for a few to gain some big prizes. Next step was getting the funding for all this boom-boom extravaganza. And here we have another waste of some 100 minutes in the life of the viewer.At the end, I could not see any other reasons for this movie to exist than a list of me toos and the holy profit. This movie says nothing. I mean nothing. Not "nothing new" after all some two decades of War in Vietnam movies.The 60s was about social change. There is none. Probably the soldiers in that war were specially chosen to be purely ignorant about anything going on in the US. But how many stones had the recruitment officers to turn? The Civil Rights Movement? Zero. The army was perfectly desegregated and no racist ever went to that war. Sex? Some, but not too much. Drugs? As nonexistent. Massacres? Only of Americans.A whitewashing piece of propaganda with no personality.Contact me with Questions, Comments or Suggestions ryitfork @ bitmail.ch

Freedom060286 The movie Hamburger Hill is based on a real battle in 1969. It's one of the few Vietnam War movies to portray the soldiers in a realistic and accurate way. Most of the others fail to do justice for the brave men who fought there.Rather than stereotyping soldiers as either druggies or genocidal redneck maniacs (as we see in movies like Platoon), this one portrays the troops as what they were: just ordinary, average men trying to do a very difficult and demanding job. More than any other movie about Vietnam, this one shows the misery that the men were going through, not only in battle, but due to the unfairly negative image of the Vietnam troops the American media was creating at that time.

ebiros2 This is an '80s style war movie where the focus is on the individual soldier instead of the war itself. There's another war movie that''s similar in this respect from the '80s called the "Full Metal Jacket".Although the movie depicts the worst battle, it's the characters of each man that gives this story the meaning. What happens to each of them, you need to see the movie, but it will keep you interested for the entire course of the film.The movie shows what happens to the recruits during and after the by then hugely unpopular war in Viet Nam. United States had no moral reasons to be there, and the modus operandi was not acceptable to the generally middle class Americans. The brutality of the combat, and the sentiment of the society plus the mindset of each solider forms an interesting landscape of the movie.In this sense, this is one of a kind movie on Viet Nam war. The conflict to the soldiers were not only external but also internal. Good movie that has meaning to those who were there and those who stayed behind.