If you've ever met a sheltered high school kid who paid attention to the news for the first time, or read his first criticism of war or capitalism, this film is like that.
That kid's POV, and this film's, are not wrong. But you find yourself pretty annoyed and very bored that this kid and this film tell you what you already know, and do it in such a clumsy, heavy handed, and unoriginal predictable way.
This is really bad satire. It's not clever, not even close to funny. Not once.
And the directing is as bad as the writing. The acting is like watching the filming of a high school play, except that somehow major Hollywood actors were talked into being in this bad, bad film.
So many reviews claim this film is daring or prescient. Only if you don't know your history. The public had become cynical about Vietnam a decade earlier, and about wars in the Mideast, and the media.
The hoax attack in the Gulf of Tonkin incident and scandals over inflated body counts were already known to everyone. That's part of why this film was ignored and bombed.
That kid's POV, and this film's, are not wrong. But you find yourself pretty annoyed and very bored that this kid and this film tell you what you already know, and do it in such a clumsy, heavy handed, and unoriginal predictable way.
This is really bad satire. It's not clever, not even close to funny. Not once.
And the directing is as bad as the writing. The acting is like watching the filming of a high school play, except that somehow major Hollywood actors were talked into being in this bad, bad film.
So many reviews claim this film is daring or prescient. Only if you don't know your history. The public had become cynical about Vietnam a decade earlier, and about wars in the Mideast, and the media.
The hoax attack in the Gulf of Tonkin incident and scandals over inflated body counts were already known to everyone. That's part of why this film was ignored and bombed.