I’m not a fan of war movies, but I watch them with my husband. Being retired military from a long line of family members who were military, its a given that he likes war movies.
The first time I watched this movie in the theatre, I started crying within about the first 20 minutes of the movie and I cried all the way through it.
I can’t tell you the whole history of the movie or the background (read nathan’s review for that, he did an excellent job), but I can talk about this movie from an ’’Army wife’’ point of view.
The setting of this movie is Ft. Benning, Georgia. The area where they filmed was very familiar to me, as it was the area my husband was stationed before leaving for Saudi Arabia for Operation Desert Storm. I know well the fears that those wives had within them as they waited for their husbands to be deployed to battle.
Watching these men prepare, especially Mel Gibson as his role of Col. Moore, I understood the thoughts going through his mind. And I understood the fear in his own heart of leaving his wife and children, as every man who is in such a situation has.
I think that the producers of this movie did a wonderful job of going between the battle field and home, showing what the men were going through in that first horrible battle, and what the families were going through at home.
Without giving away the movie to those who have not seen it yet, the part of the movie where the wives first begin to be informed of the deaths of their husbands literally broke my heart.
And I think they did a wonderful job of not portraying either side as the villain. It is an honest portrayal of the fact that war is hell for both sides. So often the Vietnamese solders are portrayed as the ’’bad guys’’ and so it’s OK that they died, but not our men, but that’s not so. They were husbands, fathers, sons, brothers just like our men were.
This was a hard movie for me to watch because of so many things that I could identify with not only because of my husband’s involvement in Operation Desert Storm (not that ODS in ANY way compares with how Viet Nam was) but also because my father is a Viet Nam vet and I could finally understand so much that he has never been able to talk about.
I highly recommend watching this movie.