gogoschka-1 Compelling civil war drama by Oliver Stone with a great James Woods (as well as a great Jim Belushi). Stone's best films have always been his highly political ones, and this is no exception. Brutal, realistic portrayal of the conflict in El Salvador and America's implications. This is one to re-discover by film fans as it seems to have fallen a bit into obscurity over the years. Highly recommended: 8 stars out of 10.In case you're interested in more underrated masterpieces, here's some of my favorites:imdb.com/list/ls070242495

rogerdarlington "Platoon" and "Salvador" were both released in 1986 and both written and directed by the renegade Oliver Stone. The former won the Academy Award for Best Film, while the latter was a commercial failure. Stone found it extremely difficult to get finding for "Salvador" and it was made on a low budget. Clearly, this brave, but uncomfortable, film - an examination of the poverty and carnage of the developing civil war in 1980-81 El Salvador - was just too political and too critical of American foreign policy for Hollywood financiers US audiences.However, James Woods gives an excellent and Oscar-nominated performance as a self- centred and hard living American war photographer based on the real-life Richard Boyle who co-wrote the script. A number of the incidents portrayed - notably the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero - actually happened. The anarchic violence is reminiscent of "Missing", while the photographer-at-war theme reminds one of "Under Fire", two other political films about Latin America (it was actually shot in Mexico). The movie is fast-paced, powerful and committed with the Boyle character making something of a polemical speech - justifiably hard-hitting - in a scene set in the US Embassy in San Salvador.I first saw the film on its release in the UK in 1987. I revisited the work after I went to El Salvador in 2014, a trip which included seeing the tomb of Romero and the site of a Government-sponsored massacre. The civil war actually began in 1989, was still running at the time of the making of "Salvador", and did not end until 1992. By then, some 70,000-80,000 had been killed, including around 'disappeared'.

mqdan Excellent casting, performances and storytelling by Stone. The major difficulty in watching his re-telling of the true story is the looseness with which he interprets the events and uses the creative license to fill in with completely fictional elements. This isn't a bad thing but, as with all Stone movies, he gives them the illusion of 'reality' by interspersing these fictional elements with the same weight as the real elements. Adding the text post-scripts further enhances this dichotomy and blurs the lines between the actual true story and the "true" story he is telling. James Woods does a phenomenal job of portraying a peripheral real life journalist into a main story character as written by Stone and Boyle. This movie is very entertaining, makes you think and should encourage those who are unfamiliar with the events of this time period and area to actually read up on the scholarly accounts of these events.

dougdoepke I'm guessing the film is not high on the State Department's 'Must See' list. The movie makes several explosive political connections – a newly elected President Reagan connects to unleashed military aid to Salvador that connects to fascistic military rule that connects to Salvador's wealthy class that connects to oppression of the country's huge, impoverished peasantry that finally connects to a bloody civil war. It's a deadly cycle based on fact, and on the US's ability to supply an unpopular regime with superior weaponry. Not exactly the image our corporate image-makers like to construct.Frankly, I can't imagine anyone in the role of the reporter Boyle other than the hyper James Woods. He's like a whirling top on speed. He doesn't walk, he lurches; he doesn't talk, he pleads, whines, and pontificates. But he's just the kind of off-center personality loopy enough to stick his neck out in a war zone. Plus, he knows the political score by being "the last reporter out of Cambodia", as he loves to say. I especially like his encounter with the well- coiffed blonde at the fancy outdoor reception. She's a big-time reporter there to echo the official line, while he looks like he snuck in the back door. But he'll have none of her State Department pabulum. He may be annoying, but his patriotism is based on speaking the truth to power, as the saying goes. No wonder he's unemployed. All in all, Boyle amounts to a James Woods triumph.The movie itself is chaotic, as it should be since we're in the middle of a civil war. It's also about as un-Hollywood looking as commercial movies get. You can spot the uppercrust running the war because they're always squeaky clean, especially the sleekly malevolent Major Casanova (Plana). The peasants, on the other hand, look like peasants since they probably are (filming was in Mexico). While Woods and Belushi look like they shop at the Salvation Army store. More tellingly, there's no attempt to render cosmetic either killing or death, especially that gripping last scene with John (Savage) and Boyle that's about as unsentimentally touching as movies get.But don't let any of this fool you. It's one heckuva movie with no compromises. Especially that last sequence that drives home the irony of the policy distance that supposedly separates the US from Latin America. All in all, Stone's film pulls off the difficult trick of refusing to pander to anyone or anything.