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Review: Apocalypse Now Redux (dir. by Francis Ford Coppola)

Posted on by Arleigh

“The horror… the horror…” — Col. Walter Kurtz

There is a specific kind of cinematic fever dream that only war, isolation, and a touch of madness can produce, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now remains its gold standard. Co-written by Coppola and John Milius (the latter a colorful, larger-than-life figure in 1970s Hollywood), the film’s screenplay originally leaned harder into Milius’s romantic vision of martial will before Coppola reshaped it into something more hallucinatory and morally ambiguous. When we talk about the Redux version, released in 2001, twenty-two years after the original, we are not just revisiting that fever dream; we are plunging back into an even more hallucinatory, bloated, and revealing cut of the material.

At over three hours and twenty minutes, Apocalypse Now Redux is both a gift and a test of endurance. For those who only know the theatrical cut, this version feels less like a director’s tweak and more like unearthing a lost, more indulgent diary entry from Coppola’s own heart of darkness. The core remains the same: Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen), a morally hollowed-out assassin, is sent upriver during the Vietnam War to terminate Colonel Walter Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a once-brilliant Green Beret who has gone rogue and set himself up as a demi-god in the Cambodian jungle. The structure is a loose but unmistakable adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s classic 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, transposing Conrad’s grim critique of Belgian colonialism onto America’s own imperial overreach in Southeast Asia. Conrad’s journey up the Congo River becomes the Navy patrol boat’s crawl up the Nùng River, with each stop revealing a new layer of absurdity, violence, and spiritual decay.

The most immediate thing to address is what Redux adds, because those additions fundamentally alter the rhythm of the film. The theatrical cut is a lean, relentless descent. Redux is a meandering, hypnotic, and sometimes frustratingly pensive journey. Several major extended sequences distinguish this cut from the original. The first involves the Playboy Playmates. In the theatrical cut, we see them briefly at a chaotic USO show. In Redux, we get an extended sequence where Willard’s crew trades a canister of fuel for two hours with the stranded bunnies after their helicopter runs low on fuel. Later comes the brutal, psychedelic chaos of the Do Lung Bridge, which is extended in Redux to emphasize the utter breakdown of command and reality. And finally, deep in the journey, after surviving a tiger attack, Willard and the crew stumble upon the French rubber plantation, where a family of colonial planters refuses to leave their dying world. Each of these sequences grinds the forward momentum in different ways—the bunnies through desperate transaction, the bridge through absurd chaos, the plantation through nostalgic rot.

But to truly appreciate what Coppola is doing in Redux, you have to stop thinking of the Nùng River as a simple journey and start seeing it as a vertical descent—a layered, infernal funnel where each stop corresponds to a different circle of moral decay, much like the structure of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, the first part of his epic narrative poem The Divine Comedy. The patrol boat is not just transport; it is a cramped, filthy ferry crossing the River Styx, and the further Willard and his crew go, the thinner the veil between civilization and savagery becomes. The Redux version, with its extended sequences, actually sharpens this Dantesque geometry rather than diluting it, because each added stop becomes another hellish layer, another specific flavor of corruption rotting under the jungle canopy. And importantly, the order of these stops tells a specific story of descent. Willard first encounters raw, commodified desire at the USO show, then plunges into the absurd mechanical chaos of the Do Lung Bridge, and finally drifts into the refined, decaying nostalgia of the French plantation—each circle deeper, stranger, and more spiritually corrosive than the last.

Consider the first major stop after leaving the relative order of the Delta: the extended Playboy Playmate sequence. In Dante’s Inferno, the early circles punish the lustful and the gluttonous—sins of appetite and passion that still acknowledge desire, however distorted. This stop is the hell of commodified desire, and it functions as the upper circle of Redux’s inferno. The bunnies are not seductresses; they are air-dropped promises of home, stranded and forced to barter their presence for fuel. The crew’s transaction—a canister of gas for two hours of the bunnies’ company—is transactional depravity laid bare. There is nothing refined here. The soldiers who swarm the boat are not conquering heroes; they are starving ghosts pawing at a mirage of femininity. The corruption is the commodification of intimacy, the way the war machine grinds up even fantasy into a trade good. In Dante’s Inferno, the lustful are eternally swept by winds, never at rest. Here, the winds are helicopter rotors, and no one finds peace. This stop still has energy, still has motion—it is desperate, ugly, and pathetic, but not yet defeated. It is the first circle: sin as transaction.

Further upriver, deeper into the jungle, you hit the second major stop in Redux’s order: the Do Lung Bridge. In Dante’s structure, the middle and lower circles punish the violent, the fraudulent, and the sowers of discord—those whose sins actively tear apart the fabric of order. The bridge is a sustained vision of the eighth circle—the Malebolge, the evil ditches of the fraudulent. This is the hell of absurd, endless combat, and it sits far below the bunnies’ desperate lust because it has abandoned desire altogether. The bridge is supposed to be a strategic point, but no one in command knows who is fighting whom or even which side holds which trench. Soldiers fire blindly into the dark; engineers build and rebuild sections of bridge that are destroyed every night by an invisible enemy. The wounded groan, a psychedelic light show of flares and tracers turns the sky into a flickering carnival of death, and a dazed soldier informs Willard that this place has been “crazy” for days. There is no front line, no objective, only endless, repetitive, pointless construction and destruction. The corruption here is systemic: the war has become an autopilot nightmare where violence generates nothing but more violence. Unlike the bunnies, who still want something, the soldiers at the bridge don’t even know what they are doing anymore. They simply perform the same broken task for eternity. Willard’s only reaction is a numb observation that he should inform his superiors, but he never will. The bridge is the point where any remaining belief in order or purpose dissolves into white noise. It is the second circle: sin as automation.

Then, after the bridge’s chaos, the crew drifts into the third major stop: the French rubber plantation. In Dante’s Inferno, the deepest circles before the frozen center punish heresy and treachery—sins of the intellect and will, where belief becomes a cage. The plantation functions exactly like this. It is the hell of nostalgia and colonial rot, a step deeper than the bridge’s chaos because it has calcified into ideology. After the raw transaction of the bunnies and the absurd violence of the bridge, the crew stumbles upon a walled pocket of denial. Here, the French family sips wine, argues geopolitics, and pretends the war is a tragic inconvenience rather than a total collapse. This is the hell of the static dead—people who refuse to acknowledge that their world has already ended. The rubber trees themselves, planted in neat, tyrannical rows, symbolize extractive cruelty made mundane. Willard sleeps with a widowed French woman, a moment of hollow lust that feels more like a funeral rite than passion. The corruption here is polite, intellectual, and almost seductive—but it is still decay wearing a starched shirt. Unlike the bunnies’ squalid desperation, the plantation has manners. Unlike the bridge’s chaotic noise, the plantation has quiet arguments. That makes it more insidious, and therefore deeper in the infernal funnel. This is the third circle: sin as denial.

By the time Willard finally reaches Kurtz’s compound, he has descended past all these preparatory circles into the ninth and final circle of Dante’s Inferno—Cocytus, the frozen lake of treachery, where Satan himself is trapped in ice. Kurtz is no longer a man but a fixed point of absolute darkness. His compound is a Cambodian nightmare of severed heads, pagan rituals, and whispered monologues. Unlike the bunnies’ desperate transaction, the bridge’s absurd chaos, or the plantation’s nostalgic denial, Kurtz’s hell is complete stillness. He has murdered and been worshipped for it. He has rejected every prior layer—commerce, command, colonialism—and arrived at a nihilistic truth: that horror is the only moral absolute. Willard’s task is not to understand Kurtz but to kill him, and in doing so, to become him. That is the final descent: not into fire, but into the ice of total moral withdrawal. The Redux version emphasizes this by making Kurtz more verbose but also more inert. He is trapped not by chains, but by his own unbearable clarity. The three stops before him—the bunnies, the bridge, the plantation—are all failed attempts to build meaning in the jungle. Kurtz is the place where meaning dies entirely.

What remains unchanged, across both cuts, is the technical majesty. Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography still haunts the soul. The opening shot—a napalm-blasted jungle dissolving into the slow rotation of a ceiling fan in a Saigon hotel room, with The Doors’ “The End” whispering over the soundtrack—is one of the great tone-setters in cinema history. The Redux cut luxuriates in these images even longer, letting the heat and humidity seep through the screen. The attack on a Vietnamese sampan, where an innocent family is slaughtered in a burst of trigger-happy panic, remains devastating. Laurence Fishburne’s young, wide-eyed Clean, Dennis Hopper’s jittery, sycophantic photojournalist (a role that feels like pure id), and Robert Duvall’s iconic Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore, who loves the smell of napalm in the morning, all deliver performances that feel less like acting and more like channeling. Duvall’s surf-obsessed madman is even more absurdly perfect in Redux because the added length makes his brief screentime feel like a welcome blast of cold air before the suffocating final act.

Which brings us back to Marlon Brando as Kurtz. Here is where Redux both helps and hurts. The theatrical cut gives Kurtz a mythic, almost abstract presence—shadowy, whispering, half-sculpted. Brando showed up overweight and unprepared, so Coppola shot him mostly in shadow. In Redux, those shadows remain, but the added material includes a longer, more discursive monologue where Kurtz reads from a Time magazine article about the war and rambles about the horror of administering lethal injections to polio-stricken villagers. It is more Brando, which is never nothing, but it also demystifies the monster. The terror of Kurtz in the original cut is that he is an idea, a reflection of Willard’s own potential. In Redux, he becomes a sweaty, slightly boring philosopher. The famous “the horror, the horror” death scene still lands, but getting there feels like you have already been swimming in his rhetoric for too long. The added footage makes Kurtz more human but less terrifying, which may or may not be an improvement depending on your tolerance for Brando’s mumbling.

The casual viewer might find Redux interminable. Let’s be honest: three and a half hours of madness, helicopters, and nihilism is a lot. There are stretches in the plantation sequence where you might check your phone. The pacing is deliberately, almost arrogantly slow. Coppola is not trying to entertain you; he is trying to drown you. And in those moments of slog—when the French family drones on about geopolitics, when the bunnies’ desperation overstays its welcome, when the bridge’s chaos becomes repetitive rather than shocking—you might be tempted to declare the whole Redux experiment a failure. But here is the uncomfortable truth that separates Apocalypse Now Redux from mere indulgent director’s cuts: the film’s occasional sluggishness, its bloated digressions, its refusal to maintain a clean narrative spine, are not flaws so much as they are the correct representation of the very thing the film’s themes and narrative ideas were trying to explore. This is a movie about a journey into moral rot, about the collapse of linear purpose into circular nightmare, about men who have stared too long into the abyss and lost the ability to tell a clean story. Why should the film itself be clean? The theatrical cut is a masterpiece of compression, yes—but compression is an act of control, and Apocalypse Now is ultimately about the loss of control. The Redux version, for all its unevenness, is the more honest artifact because it refuses to polish the madness into neat dramatic beats. The original film is a nightmare you cannot wake from; Redux is the insomnia that precedes it, the sweaty, bored, terrifying awareness that there is no ending, only more jungle.

This is why, despite its longer running time and the areas where the pacing sometimes slogs through, the film overall succeeds as not just a fever dream of the filmmaker, writers, and actors who survived its legendary production—the typhoons, the heart attacks, Brando’s chaos, Sheen’s breakdown—but as the correct representation of the very thing the film’s themes and narrative ideas were trying to explore. Apocalypse Now is about the impossibility of remaining sane in an insane environment. The Redux cut, by refusing to be efficiently sane, becomes a more immersive simulation of that condition. The theatrical cut tells you about the horror; the Redux cut makes you live inside its tedious, exhausting, occasionally boring reality. And boredom is part of horror, too—the long stretches between atrocities, the waiting, the pointless arguments, the nights that won’t end. Coppola, Milius, Sheen, Brando, and everyone else who survived the Philippines shoot did not emerge with a clean story. They emerged with scars, footage, and a kind of shell-shocked awe. The Redux version honors that survival by refusing to pretend the experience was anything other than a mess. It is the director’s cut as wound, not as polish.

For the obsessive, for those who want to see the entire messy, unfinished vision behind one of the great artistic catastrophes (the documentary Hearts of Darkness is essential companion viewing), Redux is invaluable. It reveals that the original 1979 cut was a miracle of editing—a salvage job that turned a troubled production into a masterpiece. Redux is the rough draft of that miracle. It has a bloated, novelistic quality, more concerned with atmosphere than narrative efficiency. As a loose adaptation of Heart of Darkness, it is oddly more faithful than the original cut—because Conrad’s novella is also meandering, digressive, and filled with colonial asides that do not advance the plot. But faithfulness is not the same as greatness.

The Redux version is a flawed, overstuffed, hypnotic masterpiece that sometimes trips over its own ambition. It earns its runtime not through tight storytelling, but through sheer, oppressive mood. And in the end, that is the point. You are not supposed to leave Apocalypse Now feeling satisfied. You are supposed to leave feeling like you have stared into something ancient and ugly. The Redux version just makes you stare longer, dragging you down through each Dantesque circle—from the desperate, transactional depravity of the Playboy bunnies, through the absurd, autopilot chaos of the Do Lung Bridge, past the polite, rotting nostalgia of the French plantation, and finally into the frozen stillness of Kurtz’s compound—until there is nothing left but the ice and the horror. And in those moments when the film slows to a crawl, when you check your watch and wonder why we are still at the plantation, that is not a failure of art. That is the art itself, reminding you that hell is not a nonstop carnival of screams. Hell is also a long, boring dinner with people who refuse to die. Whether that is luxury or punishment is for you to decide. But Apocalypse Now Redux succeeds precisely because it trusts you to sit with that discomfort and recognize it for what it is: the truth.

Review: Hamburger Hill (dir. by John Irvin)

Posted on by Arleigh

“If you want to walk out of this fucking place, you will listen to people who know!” — Spc. Abraham “Doc” Johnson

Hamburger Hill is one of those Vietnam War movies that doesn’t really bother decorating the war with grand metaphors or tortured soul‑searching; it just puts you on the hill with the grunts and makes you feel every miserable inch of the climb. Released in 1987 and directed by John Irvin, the film is a fictionalized but tightly focused take on the real week‑long “Battle of Hamburger Hill” in the A Sầu Valley, a piece of rugged terrain in central Vietnam that saw some of the bloodiest fighting between U.S. and North Vietnamese Army (NVA) forces in May 1969. The movie dramatizes the 101st Airborne’s 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment as they’re ordered to assault a heavily fortified hill over and over again, and it leans hard into the idea that the battle is less about grand strategy and more about raw endurance and attrition.

One of the first things that strikes you about Hamburger Hill is how deliberately it avoids big stars and splashy heroics. The ensemble is made up mostly of young, relatively unknown actors, which ironically makes the cast feel more authentic. You’re not watching a famous movie star playing a grunt; you’re watching a squad of guys who could actually be kids your age sent halfway across the world to die in the mud. The central figure is second‑lieutenant Al Frantz, played by a young Dylan McDermott, who’s stepping up from a desk job into direct combat command. He’s not some infallible war‑hero archetype; he’s earnest, nervous, and visibly out of depth, which makes his slow hardening under fire feel earned rather than heroic. Watching him wrestle with guilt, responsibility, and the absurdity of the orders he’s obeying gives the film a quiet moral backbone without sliding into preachy territory.

The movie is structured around roughly ten days of repeated assaults on “Hamburger Hill,” a soggy, razor‑sharp ridge in the A Sầu Valley that the NVA had turned into a killing zone. Each push uphill is more brutal than the last, and the film doesn’t soften the violence. When someone gets hit, they don’t go down in a graceful slow‑motion shot; they drop suddenly, sometimes mid‑sentence, in a spray of gore that feels uncomfortably real. The script doesn’t fetishize the blood and mud, but it refuses to look away from it either, which makes the whole thing feel like a visceral anti‑glory tract. By the time audiences get to the tenth assault, trudging through torrents of rain and mud while bullets stitch the air around them, the sequence has the effect of a slow, grinding nightmare. It’s less about who’s “winning” and more about the fact that everyone involved is being slowly chewed up by the same machine.

What really keeps Hamburger Hill from feeling like a simple, grim slaughter‑fest is its attention to the characters in the squad. The film invests time in a handful of men—White, Black, and Latino—whose camaraderie, tensions, and private doubts slowly emerge between patrols and firefights. There’s Doc Johnson, the company medic played by Courtney B. Vance, who holds himself together with a veneer of calm professionalism while quietly absorbing the emotional toll of patching up one friend after another. Doc becomes a kind of moral anchor, someone who sees the humanity in every soldier while still recognizing the war’s dehumanizing logic. His presence also lets the film quietly deal with racial friction and class differences without turning them into tidy, feel‑good sermons. The way the soldiers talk over each other, argue about politics back home, and joke about their own fear turns squad life into a cramped, sweaty microcosm of America itself.

The political backdrop of the late‑Vietnam era is always in the background, too. The men occasionally hear distorted chunks of anti‑war protests and news coverage over the radio, and you can see how that information chips away at their sense of purpose. Some of the older soldiers, like the gruff Sgt. Worcester played by Steve Weber, have already lost whatever idealism they might have had and just want to get through the next day. Newer guys, meanwhile, are still wrestling with why they’re there at all, and whether the hill they’re dying for means anything to anyone back in the States. The film doesn’t answer those questions directly; it just lets you feel the uncertainty. That ambivalence is part of what makes Hamburger Hill feel historically grounded. It’s less interested in telling you who was right or wrong in the Vietnam War and more interested in showing what it actually felt like to be a small‑arms infantryman in late‑1969, during one of the bloodiest stretches of fighting in the A Sầu Valley.

Visually, the movie leans into a muddy, washed‑out palette that makes the Philippines‑standing‑in‑for‑Vietnam locations feel appropriately oppressive. The hill itself—the real‑life “Hamburger Hill” in the A Sầu Valley—is a constant, looming presence: slick with rain, choked with barbed wire, and studded with foxholes and bunkers. The camera often stays at ground level, jostling with the soldiers as they crawl, scramble, and stumble upward, which makes the terrain feel like an active enemy. The sound design is similarly unglamorous—gunfire isn’t especially stylized, explosions are chaotic rather than cool, and the constant hiss of rain and distant artillery keeps the film in a state of low‑grade dread. Even the score, a Philip Glass–style arrangement of repetitive, slightly unnerving motifs, adds to the feeling of being trapped in a loop of violence you can’t escape. Everything in the film is built to make the combat feel routine, exhausting, and numbing, rather than spectacular.

Another thing Hamburger Hill handles surprisingly well is the way it dovetails the physical horror of the battle with the men’s private lives back home. In quieter moments between attacks, the soldiers talk about girlfriends, family, and their plans for “after the war,” even though, for some of them, those plans are clearly not going to happen. The film doesn’t milk this stuff for melodrama; instead, it floats just beneath the surface, turning every casual conversation into a quiet pre‑eulogy. When someone makes a joke about getting back to Chicago or New York or wherever they’re from, the line feels both genuine and heartbreaking, because you know the movie might quietly erase that future a few scenes later. That low‑key sense of fragility makes the emotional impact of each death feel more personal, because the film has already taken the time to show you who these guys are when they’re not being shot at.

Narratively, the film doesn’t try to convince you that taking the hill is some great strategic triumph. If anything, it’s openly skeptical about the rationale behind the whole operation. The soldiers keep getting told to “take it, hold it, then fall back,” and the repetition of that order drives home the sense that the hill is more of a symbolic goal than a tactical necessity. The film doesn’t stage a big, dramatic monologue about this; it just lets the repetition of the mission, the rising body count, and the unanswered questions hang in the air. That choice aligns Hamburger Hill more with a film like Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket in spirit, even though its tone is far more straightforward and less stylized. It’s less interested in mythmaking and more interested in capturing the eerie timelessness of infantrymen being sent to die for reasons they don’t fully understand, during one of the fiercest set‑pieces of the Vietnam War.

In terms of its legacy, Hamburger Hill often gets overshadowed by Oliver Stone’s Platoon, which came out a year earlier and snagged the Oscars’ attention. But in a lot of ways, Irvin’s film is a grittier, more unsentimental companion piece. It doesn’t try to map the Vietnam War onto a single moral allegory, and it doesn’t give you a hero to latch onto and cheer for. Instead, it gives you a squad of men, flaws and all, and asks you to watch them go through hell while trying to keep their foothold on each other. That ensemble‑driven approach, combined with the unrelenting realism of the battle sequences, is what makes Hamburger Hill feel like less of a “movie” and more like a grim, ground‑level documentary rooted in the real‑world horror of the Battle of Hamburger Hill.

By the end, the film doesn’t offer a clean sense of resolution. The soldiers do eventually take the hill, but the victory is so hollow and so costly that it hardly feels like a win at all. The last few scenes linger on survivors looking shell‑shocked and exhausted, many of them quietly wondering what the point of it was. The movie doesn’t spell that out in a clumsy voice‑over; it trusts you to feel the absurdity and the weight of what they’ve been through. That refusal to wrap things up with a neat moral bow is one of Hamburger Hill’s strengths. It understands that sometimes the most honest thing a war film can do is show you the damage and then leave you with the questions.

In the crowded field of Vietnam War movies, Hamburger Hill stands out because it strips away the spectacle and just focuses on the brutal, day‑to‑day reality of trying to take a piece of ground that probably shouldn’t matter as much as it does. It’s not a flashy, revolutionary film, but it’s a stubbornly honest one, anchored in the real‑world carnage of the week‑long Battle of Hamburger Hill in the A Sầu Valley. It’s a movie that would rather make you feel the mud squeeze between your toes, hear the too‑close sound of automatic fire, and watch the faces of guys who’ve run out of explanations for why they’re still climbing. If you’re looking for a Vietnam film that doesn’t sugarcoat the war or overdress it in symbolism, Hamburger Hill is the kind of movie that sticks with you precisely because it doesn’t try to be anything more than what it is: a raw, claustrophobic portrait of a squad walking into a meat grinder, one rain‑soaked step at a time.

Review: Full Metal Jacket (dir. by Stanley Kubrick)

Posted on by Arleigh

“You write ‘Born to Kill’ on your helmet and you wear a peace button. What’s that supposed to be, some kind of sick joke?” — Colonel

Full Metal Jacket is the kind of war movie that sticks in your craw like old metal shavings. It’s 1987, Stanley Kubrick’s last film released in his lifetime, and it plays less like a traditional Vietnam War saga and more like a taunt packed into two very different acts. One half is a barracks horror show about how the military turns boys into killers; the other is a grubby, almost casual descent into the chaos of combat. Together, they make a movie that feels intentionally disjointed so it can drill down on the same idea from two angles: war doesn’t just brutalize your body, it reshapes your mind into something barely human.

The film follows Private J.T. “Joker” Davis, played by Matthew Modine in one of those quietly watchful performances that’s easy to underestimate. Joker starts as a kind of archetypal smart‑mouth recruit, the guy who thinks he’s above the hysteria until he realizes he isn’t. Around him swirls a platoon of young Marines going through basic training at Parris Island under the merciless Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, played with shark‑like relish by R. Lee Ermey, who was actually a real‑life Marine drill instructor. Hartman’s whole job is to obliterate softness and replace it with drilled‑in aggression, and Kubrick lingers on every insult, every barked command, until the abuse stops feeling like a setup for a war movie and starts feeling like the main event.

The first half of Full Metal Jacket is basically a single, sustained initiation ritual. The camera stays tight, almost claustrophobic, trapping you in the barracks with the recruits, so you feel the same sensory overload they do. The lighting is harsh, the colors washed out, and the camera often locks in on Hartman’s face mid‑rant, making you uncomfortably intimate with his cruelty. This isn’t training so much as a manufactured psychological war waged on the platoon’s collective brain. The recruits are constantly degraded, mocked, and forced into grotesque rituals of humiliation, and the film never lets you forget that this is the system’s idea of “making Marines.” Kubrick doesn’t fake the perverse appeal of this process either; there’s a weird, ugly thrill in how effective it is, in how the boys start enjoying the brutality once they’re inside it.

The standout character in this section is Leonard “Gomer Pyle” Lawrence, played by Vincent D’Onofrio in a performance that’s almost physically uncomfortable to watch. D’Onofrio’s Pyle is this thick‑set, awkward kid who can’t keep up, and the movie doesn’t soften his edges to make him likable. He’s genuinely bad at the routine, slow, clumsy, but he’s also clearly just trying to survive. The film lets you watch, in a very matter‑of‑fact way, how the system turns his inadequacy into a target. The other recruits are instructed to punish him, and soon everyone starts in. The film doesn’t moralize about it; it just shows that this kind of group cruelty is baked into the structure. The infamous scene where the platoon holds Leonard down with piled‑on bed sheets while whacking him with a bar of soap wrapped in a towel is less about a single act of violence than about what it means to normalize dehumanization before you ever see combat.

What’s so unsettling about Full Metal Jacket is that it never pretends Hartman is some rogue sadist. He’s not an outlier; he’s the product of the system, and he’s also the system’s avatar. In that sense, the first half of the film functions like a kind of industrial horror. The Marines are being processed like defective parts on a factory line, streamed through a machine designed to break them and then rebuild them as compliant killers. The film toys with the idea that the military doesn’t want robots so much as creatures that hunger for violence on command. The line about “we don’t want robots, we want men” is repeated with a kind of grim irony because what the film actually shows is the production of something in between: not quite human, not quite machine, but something that can pull a trigger without hesitating.

Jumping from Parris Island to the streets of Huế during the Tet Offensive, the second half of Full Metal Jacket feels like a different movie in tone but the same one in thesis. Joker, now a combat correspondent with a Stars and Stripes hat and a “Born to Kill” slogan on his helmet, is literally split down the middle between observer and participant. He carries a camera and a rifle; he’s supposed to report, but he also has to fight. The film doesn’t resolve that tension the way a more sentimental war movie would. Instead, it lets Joker drift in that gray zone where war is equal parts absurdity and atrocity. The Vietnamese civilians are largely faceless, and the war itself is shown as a series of loosely connected vignettes—raids, ambushes, random firefights—rather than a grand narrative of heroism or tragedy.

Kubrick’s Vietnam is less a country and more a ruined theater set. The cityscapes are wide, desolate, and oddly beautiful in their destruction, as if the war has turned everything into a series of bleak tableaux. The camera doesn’t linger on gore for shock value; it lingers to make the war feel like a permanent, almost aesthetic state of ruin. Individual soldiers pop in and out: Animal Mother, the violently unhinged Marine played by Adam Baldwin; Cowboy, the earnest, almost naive replacement; and the rest of the squad, who oscillate between fear, boredom, and bursts of casual cruelty. None of them are given the kind of tragic backstories that usually make you emotionally invested in a war film. Instead, they’re presented as fragments of a larger machine, each one another cog in the same indifferent system.

The film’s most famous structural trick is its way of keeping politics at arm’s length while still radiating a deeply skeptical view of the war. It doesn’t really bother telling you who’s right or wrong, or why the Marines are there. It just shows what they become and what they do. The movie doesn’t ask you to sympathize with the Marines in the way some war films do; it asks you to recognize the mirror. The famous ending, where the Marines march through flaming ruins to the tune of Mickey Mouse, is pure Kubrick dark surrealism. The cheerful cartoon theme clashes violently with the apocalyptic imagery, and the soldiers chant along with a kind of manic innocence that feels like the last vestige of humanity being cannibalized by the war itself. It’s hard to tell whether the moment is tragic, absurd, or both, and that’s the point.

Full Metal Jacket is also a film about storytelling and the way narratives are weaponized. Joker, as a reporter, is supposed to package the war for a distant audience. He’s there to turn chaos into digestible stories, but the movie quietly undermines that idea by showing how unreliable those narratives are. The soldiers’ own stories are laced with jokes, bravado, misogyny, and casual racism, and the film doesn’t clean them up. It lets you sit with the ugliness, even when it’s delivered with a laugh. The film doesn’t romanticize the Marines’ camaraderie or soften their cruelty; it just lets you watch them behave like ordinary guys who happen to be doing something extraordinary and monstrous.

The cinematography in Full Metal Jacket is cold and precise, which is exactly what the material needs. The camera behaves like a reluctant witness, framing the Marines in symmetrical, almost clinical compositions that make their brutality look routine rather than spectacular. The score is minimal, and the film often relies on diegetic sound—machine‑gun fire, jeep engines, distant explosions, Hartman’s voice echoing off concrete walls—to ground you in the sensory overload of military life. Even the few moments of levity feel like concessions to show business more than true relief. The soldiers’ jokes are rarely funny in a wholesome way; they’re the kind of gallows humor that keeps you from noticing how broken you’ve become.

What ultimately makes Full Metal Jacket endure is that it refuses to offer catharsis. By the time the film ends, nothing has been “resolved” in the way Hollywood usually expects. Joker survives, but the war doesn’t; it just keeps going, and the Marines keep marching, chanting, and killing. The film doesn’t build toward a big speech about the futility of war or a tear‑jerker about fallen comrades. It just suggests, quietly and persistently, that the process outlined in the boot‑camp half is drafted, again, in the streets of Vietnam. You go in as a boy, you’re molded into something sharper and meaner, and then you’re sent out into a world that rewards that sharpness. The movie doesn’t need to say this out loud; it just shows it happening in scene after scene.

In that sense, Full Metal Jacket is one of the most honest anti‑war films precisely because it doesn’t pretend to be a plea for peace. It’s a portrait of a machine that feeds on itself, and of the people who get caught in its gears. It’s funny, disturbing, infuriating, and occasionally mesmerizing, sometimes all at once. It’s not a movie that wants to hold your hand or make you feel better about the human race. It wants you to stare at the gleam on that full metal jacket bullet and wonder what it took to make someone pull the trigger. That’s the real power of Full Metal Jacket: it doesn’t try to redeem the war, the soldiers, or the audience. It just makes sure you can’t look away.

Review: Platoon (dir. by Oliver Stone)

Posted on by Arleigh

“We been kicking other peoples asses for so long, I figured it’s time we got ours kicked.” — Sgt. Elias

Platoon is one of those war movies that still feels raw, mean, and strangely alive decades later. It is not just a Vietnam movie about combat; it is a movie about confusion, fear, moral collapse, and what happens when young people are dropped into a nightmare with no real sense of why they are there.

What makes Platoon hit so hard is that it never feels polished in a comforting way. Oliver Stone keeps the film close to the mud, sweat, and panic of the battlefield, but he also spends plenty of time on the uglier stuff that happens between firefights: the resentment, the paranoia, the bullying, and the way men start forming little kingdoms inside a war zone. That is where the movie gets its power. The bullets matter, but so do the silences and side glances, because those moments show how war breaks people down before it even kills them.

Charlie Sheen’s Chris Taylor is a smart choice for the center of the film because he starts out as a kind of blank witness. He is young, idealistic in a vague way, and clearly not prepared for what he has walked into. That makes him easy to identify with, but it also makes him useful as a lens for everything around him. We learn the rules of this miserable little ecosystem as he does. Through Chris, the audience is pulled into the same sense of helpless observation that seems to define the whole experience of the platoon.

Stone’s screenplay makes that connection even stronger because he wrote it himself, drawing on his own experience as a young man who volunteered to go to Vietnam instead of being drafted. That detail gives Chris Taylor’s story a personal charge, since Chris feels less like a fictional stand-in and more like Stone working through his own memory and guilt. It adds another layer to the film’s emotional weight, because the perspective feels lived-in rather than invented for dramatic effect.

The film’s real muscle comes from the conflict between Sergeant Elias and Sergeant Barnes, played with complete commitment by Willem Dafoe and Tom Berenger. Elias feels like the last thread of conscience in a collapsing world. Barnes, by contrast, is the kind of man war can easily turn into a weapon: hard, cold, frightening, and convinced that brutality is just realism with the sentiment stripped out. Their conflict gives the movie a mythic quality without draining away its grit. It is not subtle in the usual sense, but it does not need to be. Stone wants these figures to feel bigger than life because that is how they register to a terrified kid in the jungle.

One of the best things about Platoon is how it balances chaos with purpose. A lot of war films either try to turn combat into spectacle or turn it into a lecture. Platoon mostly avoids both traps. The action is ugly, disorienting, and often difficult to follow in exactly the right way. You do not watch these battles and admire the choreography as much as you feel the confusion of everyone inside them. The filmmaking keeps you from getting too comfortable, which is exactly the point. War here is not heroic; it is exhausting, degrading, and terrifying.

That sense of exhaustion matters because the movie understands that war is not made up of only the big moments people remember. It is made up of waiting, heat, boredom, fear, and the slow erosion of judgment. Platoon is at its best when it lingers on that middle ground. The soldiers are not always in immediate danger, but they are always under pressure. That constant tension is what makes the movie feel so oppressive. Even when nothing explodes, it still feels like something bad is about to happen.

Stone also deserves credit for making a Vietnam movie that feels personal without becoming self-congratulatory. You can feel that this comes from experience, but the film never becomes some smug “I was there” statement. Instead, it channels memory into mood, character, and atmosphere. That gives the movie a lived-in authenticity that a lot of war films chase but never quite reach. It feels like a film made by someone trying to tell the truth about a memory that never stopped hurting.

There is also something brutally effective about the way Platoon presents morality as unstable rather than cleanly divided. The movie does not really pretend that everyone is either noble or evil. Instead, it shows how stress, fear, resentment, and power can shove people toward terrible choices. That is a big reason the film still works. It understands that war does not just expose character; it distorts it. Men do things they would never do anywhere else, and the movie keeps asking what is left of a person after that kind of damage.

Still, Platoon is not perfect, and part of its reputation comes from how forcefully it makes its points. Some viewers may find it a little heavy-handed at times, especially in the way it frames innocence, corruption, and betrayal. It is not exactly a subtle film, and it does occasionally aim for emotional impact with both fists. But honestly, that intensity is part of its identity. The movie is not trying to be cool or detached. It wants to wound you a little, and for this material, that approach makes sense.

The performances help keep the film from tipping over into empty grandstanding. Dafoe brings a wounded humanity to Elias that makes him feel like more than just a symbol. Berenger gives Barnes a dangerous stillness that is often more frightening than outright aggression. Sheen, meanwhile, does the important work of holding the center without overpowering the film. He is not the flashiest presence, but he does not need to be. His job is to absorb the madness, and that gives the audience a place to stand inside it.

What lingers most after Platoon is not any single battle scene, but the feeling that the whole movie is about a collapse of trust. Trust in leaders, trust in comrades, trust in the idea that there is some larger meaning to all this suffering. The film strips those things away layer by layer until all that is left is survival and the hope that maybe, somehow, the nightmare will end. That is a bleak place to sit for two hours, but it is also why the film remains so effective. It does not romanticize the experience. It forces you to sit with its mess.

The movie also has a strong visual identity. The jungle is not just background; it feels like an active pressure on every scene. The humidity, the darkness, the mud, and the smoke all help create a world that seems hostile even when nobody is shooting. That physical texture is a huge part of the movie’s success. You can almost feel the environment draining the people inside it. It is less like watching a battle than like watching human beings slowly get swallowed by a swamp of fear and violence.

If there is a reason Platoon still gets talked about so often, it is because it captures a very specific kind of war movie truth: the enemy is not only out there. Sometimes the real damage comes from within the unit, within the chain of command, within the soldier’s own mind. That is a grim idea, but Platoon never feels empty or cynical for saying it. It feels honest. And honesty, in a movie like this, goes a long way.

In the end, Platoon is powerful because it refuses to let war look clean, noble, or emotionally tidy. It is messy, relentless, and often hard to watch, but that is exactly why it matters. It is one of the defining Vietnam films for a reason, and even with its blunt edges, it earns that status through sheer force of feeling, strong performances, and a bleak sense of truth that never really lets up.

Review: The Dirty Dozen (dir. by Robert Aldrich)

Posted on by Arleigh

“And kill any officer in sight. Ours or theirs?” — Victor Franko

The Dirty Dozen is one of those war movies that feels like it was built in a lab for maximum “guys-on-a-mission” entertainment: big stars, a pulpy premise, plenty of attitude, and a third act that goes full-tilt brutal. It is also, even by 1967 standards, a pretty gnarly piece of work, and how well it plays today depends a lot on how comfortable you are with its mix of macho camaraderie, anti-authoritarian swagger, and disturbingly gleeful violence.

Directed by Robert Aldrich and released in 1967, The Dirty Dozen is set in 1944 and follows Major John Reisman (Lee Marvin), a rebellious U.S. Army officer assigned to turn a group of twelve military convicts into a commando unit for a suicide mission behind enemy lines just before D-Day. The deal is simple and grim: survive the mission to assassinate a gathering of German high command at a chateau, and your death sentence or long prison stretch gets commuted; fail, and you die as planned, just a little earlier and with more explosions. It is a high concept that plays almost like a war-movie prototype of the “villains forced to do hero work” formula that modern blockbusters keep revisiting.

The film’s biggest asset is its cast, stacked with personalities who bring a rough, lived-in charm to what could have been a lineup of interchangeable tough guys. Lee Marvin’s Reisman is the glue: a cynical, gravel-voiced officer who clearly hates bureaucratic brass almost as much as the criminals he is supposed to whip into shape, and Marvin plays him with a dry, weary sarcasm that avoids hero worship even as the film asks you to root for him. Around him, you get Charles Bronson as Wladislaw, a capable former officer with a chip on his shoulder; John Cassavetes as Franko, the volatile, insubordinate troublemaker; Jim Brown as Jefferson, whose physical presence and final-act heroics leave a strong impression; and Telly Savalas as Archer J. Maggott, a violently racist, fanatically religious, and almost certainly deranged soldier sentenced to death for raping and beating a woman to death. Savalas never softens that portrait, playing Maggott with a creepy combination of sing-song piety and sudden bursts of viciousness that makes him deeply uncomfortable to watch and the one member of the Dozen who feels like an outright monster even compared to the other killers. He sells Maggott’s self-justifying religiosity—quoting scripture, talking about being “called on” by the Lord—as both delusional and dangerous, so every time he starts sermonizing, it feels like a warning siren that things are about to go bad, and that pays off in the finale where his obsession with “sinful” women sabotages the mission. Even smaller roles from Donald Sutherland, Clint Walker, and others get memorable beats, which helps the ensemble feel like an actual crew rather than background noise.

For much of its runtime, the film plays like a rough-and-rowdy training camp movie, and that middle stretch is where a lot of its charm sits. Reisman’s solution to building teamwork is basically to grind the men down, deny them basic comforts, and force them to build their own camp, leading to the nickname “the Dirty Dozen” when their shaving kits are confiscated and they slip into permanent grime. The squad slowly gels through a mix of forced labor, competitive drills, and a memorable war-games exercise where they outsmart a rival, straight-laced unit led by Colonel Breed (Robert Ryan), which lets the film indulge in its anti-authority streak by making the rule-breakers look smarter than the regulation-obsessed brass. Savalas’s Maggott adds a constant sense of volatility to these scenes, his presence giving the group dynamic a genuine horror edge that keeps the movie from becoming a simple “lovable rogues” fantasy and making viewers eager to see him punished.

That anti-establishment energy is one of the reasons The Dirty Dozen hit so hard with audiences in the late 1960s, especially as public attitudes toward war and authority were shifting in the shadow of Vietnam. The movie clearly enjoys showing higher-ranking officers as petty, hypocritical, or out of touch, while Reisman and his misfit killers get framed as the ones who actually understand how war really works: dirty, improvisational, and morally compromised. Critics at the time noted that this defiant attitude, coupled with the convicts’ transformation into rough heroes, gave the film a rebellious appeal that helped it become a box office smash even as traditional war films were losing their shine.

Where the film becomes more divisive is in its moral perspective, or arguably its lack of one. From the start, these are not misunderstood saints: several of the men are condemned to death for murder, others for violent crimes and serious offenses, and the script never really suggests they were framed or unfairly treated. Yet once they are pointed at Nazis, the movie largely invites you to cheer them on, leaning into the idea that in war, the ugliest tools might be the most effective, and that conventional standards of justice and morality can be suspended if the target is the enemy. Maggott stands apart here as the line the film refuses to cross into sympathy, with Savalas’s committed and unsettling performance underlining how poisonous he is even to other criminals.

The climax at the chateau is where this tension really spikes. The mission involves infiltrating a mansion where German officers and their companions are gathering, rigging the place with explosives, and driving the survivors into an underground shelter that is then sealed and turned into a mass deathtrap with gasoline and grenades. It is a sequence staged with brutal efficiency and undeniable suspense, but it is also deeply unsettling, essentially pushing the protagonists into orchestrating a massacre that includes unarmed officers and civilians in evening wear, and the film offers minimal reflection on that horror beyond the visceral thrills. Maggott’s instability forces the team to react mid-mission, heightening the jagged tonal mix of rousing action and casual atrocity.

This blend of rousing action and casual atrocity did not sit well with many critics in 1967. Contemporary reviews complained that the film glorified sadism, blurred the line between wartime necessity and psychopathic cruelty, and practically bathed its criminals “in a heroic light,” encouraging what one critic called a “spirit of hooliganism” that was socially corrosive. Others, however, praised Aldrich for making a tough, uncompromising adventure picture that pushed back against sanitized war clichés, arguing that the cruelty and amorality felt like a more honest reflection of war’s ugliness, even if the film coated it in action-movie swagger and gallows humor. Savalas’s Maggott amplifies this debate, singled out by fans as a great, memorable character who adds real repulsion without turning into a cartoon.

From a modern perspective, the violence itself remains intense but not especially graphic by contemporary standards; what lingers is the attitude around it. The movie’s glee in letting some of these characters off the moral hook, contrasted with the genuinely disturbing behavior of someone like Maggott, creates that jagged tonal mix: part old-school “men on a mission” yarn, part cynical commentary on the kind of men war turns into tools. Depending on your tolerance, that mix either gives the film an edge that keeps it from feeling like simple nostalgia, or it plays as carelessly flippant about atrocities that deserve more introspection than a last-minute body count and a fade-out.

On a craft level, though, The Dirty Dozen still works surprisingly well. Aldrich keeps the film moving across a long runtime by building distinct phases: the recruitment and introduction of each convict, the training and bonding section with its rough humor and humiliation, and the final mission that shifts into suspense and near-horror. The action is clear and muscular, the editing sharp enough that you rarely lose track of who is where, and the sound design—even recognized with an Academy Award for Best Sound Effects—helps the chaos of the finale land with blunt impact.

At the same time, the structure exposes a few weaknesses. The early sections do such a good job of sketching out personalities that some characters feel underused or abruptly sidelined once the bullets start flying, and the film’s length can make parts of the training montage drag, especially if you are less enamored with its barracks humor and macho posturing. The writing also leans on broad types—psychopath, wisecracking crook, stoic professional—which the cast elevates, but the script rarely pushes them into truly surprising territory, beyond a few late-movie acts of sacrifice.

Still, as a piece of war-movie history, The Dirty Dozen earns its reputation. It helped popularize the template of the misfit team thrown into an impossible mission, a structure that later shows up everywhere from ensemble war pictures to superhero teams and modern “suicide squad” stories. Its mix of black humor, anti-authoritarian streak, and violent catharsis captures a specific late-1960s mood, even as its politics and ethics remain muddy enough to spark debate decades later. Savalas’s turn as Maggott ensures that edge never dulls, keeping the film’s thrills packaged with a moral outlook as messy and conflicted as the men it sends to kill.

For someone coming to it fresh now, the film plays as a rough, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes queasy ride: entertaining as pulp, compelling as an ensemble showcase, and troubling in the way it treats brutality as both a necessary evil and a spectator sport. If you are interested in the evolution of war cinema or the origins of the “ragtag squad on a suicide mission” trope, The Dirty Dozen is absolutely worth watching, with the understanding that its strengths—like Savalas’s chilling Maggott—come wrapped in those ethical ambiguities.

4 Shots From 4 Films: Charles Bronson Edition

Posted on by Arleigh

I think it’s becoming a sort of unofficial tradition to celebrate a particular film legend’s birthday using the 4 Shots From 4 Films series as platform to showcase these individuals best and lesser-known films.

Today, we focus and celebrate what would’ve been the 93rd birthday of one Charles Dennis Buchinsky. That name may not resonate to the csual film fans, but I’m sure his chosen professional moniker will: Charles Bronson.

Charles Bronson was part of that group of actors during the 60’s and 70’s who epitomized the macho and badass personality on the big-screen. Bronson’s legacy has lived on through such classic films as The Magnificent Seven, The Dirty Dozen and Once Upon A Time In America right up to his more lesser-known films such as Hard Times, Telefon and Death Hunt.

4 shots from 4 films

The Magnificent Seven (dir. by John Sturges)

The Magnificent Seven (dir. by John Sturges)

TheDirtyDozen

The Dirty Dozen (dir. by Robert Aldrich)

Once Upon A Time In the West (dir. by Sergio Leone)

Once Upon A Time In the West (dir. by Sergio Leone)

Death Hunt (dir. by Peter R. Hunt)

Death Hunt (dir. by Peter R. Hunt)

Scenes I Love: Saving Private Ryan

Posted on by Arleigh

SavingPrivateRyan

Today marks the 71st Anniversary of the Normandy Landings on D-Day. As the day winds down I thought it best to share one of my favorite scenes from a film that tried to capture the chaos and death of the fateful day on June 6, 1944. The film in question is Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. This is the film which won him his second Best Director Oscar (I still think the film should’ve won Best Picture over Shakespeare In Love) and the film which helped redefine not just how war films were shot from 1998 on, but also de-glorify World War II on film.

This scene showed the opening moments of the D-Day Landings on Omaha Beach in Normandy, France. It’s a scene that’s over 22-minutes in length and shows the utter chaos and destruction heaped on American troops as they attempted to land on the beach to take their objectives. While there have been war film before Saving Private Ryan that depicted war as the hell it truly is they were mostly about the Vietnam War. Rarely did we ever get a World War II-based war film which showed war in realistic fashion. Spielberg broke that taboo by making the battle scenes in his film — especially this extended opening sequence — done as realistic as possible without actually having people killed for real on-screen.

When this film first came out in the summer of 1998 no one knew what to make of it. This opening sequence became the talk of everyone who went to see the film. To say that they were shocked by what they saw was an understatement. Even now with over a decade since the film was released and people having seen this scene over and over again it still retain it’s impact. It’s not even the grand scale of the production required to film this action sequence which made this scene so memorable. It were the little things. Like a mortally wounded American GI crying out to his mother while trying to keep his blown out insides from spilling out. Then there’s the scene of another young soldier praying furiously with his rosary beads as men around him die by the score.

This scene also showed what most World War II films of the past failed to do. It showed both sides behaving barbarically. In the past, only the Germans were shown in a bad light. In Saving Private Ryan, we see that American soldiers were also prone at shooting surrendering troops and/or not mercy-killing enemy soldiers being burned alive (actions that have been well-documented by historians). This scene also showed just how courageous the young men of this generation which Tom Brokaw has called “The Greatest Generation”. Men who went off to war not for material gains, but for an idea that they had to stop evil (Nazi and Hitler) from taking all of Europe and, maybe, the world itself.

There’s a reason why Saving Private Ryan is in my list for greatest films of all-time and why this scene remains one of my all-time favorites.

Review: Fury (dir. by David Ayer)

Posted on by Arleigh

“Ideals are peaceful. History is violent.”

You know that feeling when a war movie tries so hard to be gritty that it forgets to be anything else? Fury, directed by David Ayer, flirts with that problem but mostly stays on the right side of the line. Released in 2014, this WWII drama follows a five-man American tank crew as they push deeper into Nazi Germany in April 1945. The war is almost over, but as the film constantly reminds us, that only makes the fighting more desperate and meaningless. Ayer, who wrote Training Day and directed End of Watch, clearly wanted to make a grimy, claustrophobic, and visceral experience—not a clean, heroic adventure. And for the most part, he succeeds. But the movie is also uneven, sometimes brilliant, and occasionally frustrating. One thing becomes clear early on: Ayer is not just making a war movie. He is trying to out-war the war movie that changed everything. Saving Private Ryan raised the bar for realistic combat violence in 1998, and ever since, directors have been chasing that opening Omaha Beach sequence. Fury spends its entire runtime trying to shove that bar even higher, especially in its final act, where the violence tips over from realistic into something almost performative—as if Ayer is daring you to look away.

The plot is simple. We meet Don “Wardaddy” Collier, played by Brad Pitt, as the seasoned commander of a Sherman tank nicknamed “Fury.” His crew includes Boyd “Bible” Swan (Shia LaBeouf), the religious gunner; Coon-Ass (Jon Bernthal), the volatile loader; and Grady (also Bernthal, though the character is actually Grady “Coon-Ass” Travis; the movie gives everyone a nickname). The crew loses their assistant driver in the opening scene, and they get a replacement: Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), a young typist who has never fired a gun and has no intention of killing anyone. The rest of the film is basically a crash course in how war turns gentle men into monsters—or at least into effective killers.

What works best in Fury is the sense of being trapped inside a steel coffin. Ayer films almost everything from inside the tank or right next to it. You hear every shell clank, every engine strain, every bullet ping off the hull. The sound design is incredible—it’s the kind of movie where you feel the bass in your chest during combat scenes. And the tank battles are brutally realistic. There’s no slick choreography here. When a German Tiger tank shows up, the fight becomes static, clumsy, and terrifying. The Sherman isn’t some superhero; it’s outgunned and out-armored, and the crew wins only because they’re desperate and lucky. That sequence alone is worth the price of admission. You can feel Ayer’s respect for Saving Private Ryan in those moments—the same handheld cameras, the same sudden death, the same sense that no one is safe. But then the film goes further.

Brad Pitt gives one of his tougher, quieter performances. Wardaddy isn’t a philosopher or a hero. He’s a tired man who has seen too much and made too many compromises. He forces Norman to execute a German prisoner, not out of cruelty but out of a cold, broken logic: if Norman can’t kill, he’ll get the whole crew killed. Pitt sells the weight of that decision without grand speeches. Shia LaBeouf is surprisingly restrained as Bible, a character who prays before each battle but never preaches. The real surprise is Logan Lerman. He starts as a scared kid who vomits at the sight of corpses and ends the film doing things that would ruin anyone’s soul. His transformation is uncomfortable to watch, but that’s the point.

However, the movie has some clunky moments. One extended scene has Wardaddy and Norman sharing a meal with two German women in an abandoned apartment. It’s supposed to show a brief flash of normal life—eggs, music, a soft bed—but it feels oddly staged. The women are just props. They have no real personality except to be gentle and then get killed offscreen. It’s a rare moment where Ayer’s macho instincts flatten the story instead of deepening it. But the real problem is the final act. The crew holds a crossroads against an entire SS battalion of about 200 men, doing it with a broken-down tank that cannot move. Realistically, they’d be dead in minutes. But Ayer turns it into a grim last stand that feels more like a Western than a WWII movie. The Germans attack in waves like idiots, running straight into machine-gun fire. And here is where you sense Ayer’s real intention: he is not trying to be realistic anymore. He is trying to one-up Saving Private Ryan by making the violence not just brutal but excessive, almost numbing. Limbs fly. Faces get torn open. The camera lingers on wounds long past the point of necessary storytelling. It feels like Ayer is saying, “You thought Spielberg was intense? Watch this.” But instead of adding emotional weight, the violence starts to feel like a dare. The movie becomes less about these five men and more about proving it can stomach more than any other war film.

Thematically, Fury is about how institutions crush individuality. Norman was a decent person who typed letters and likely never hurt anyone. By the end, he is sitting in the commander’s seat, pulling triggers without hesitation. The movie doesn’t celebrate this—it presents it as a tragedy. But the final act undercuts that tragedy because it becomes so cartoonishly violent that you stop feeling for the characters and just wait for the bloodshed to end. Unlike Saving Private Ryan, which uses its famous opening sequence to establish horror and then pulls back for character moments, Fury seems to think that more gore equals more truth. It doesn’t. It just equals more gore.

If you’re looking for a clean story with clear good guys and bad guys, this isn’t it. The Germans are offscreen most of the time, and the real enemy is the war itself. Wardaddy even says, “The only thing that separates us from them is this uniform.” That’s a heavy line, and the film never really resolves it. It just lets it hang there. Some critics called Fury shallow because it raises moral questions without answering them. I’d argue that’s the point. War doesn’t come with footnotes. You just survive or you don’t. But the film’s desperate need to prove it is tougher than its predecessors does make it feel, at times, like a younger brother showing off.

On a technical level, the cinematography by Roman Vasyanov is beautiful in a grim way. Colors are desaturated—browns, grays, washed-out greens. Mud and blood look the same. The camera shakes when it needs to, but it’s not the hyperactive Bourne style. It’s controlled chaos. And the final shot, where the camera slowly pulls back from the dead tank, is haunting. It stays with you.

So, final verdict? Fury is a solid, often great war film that trips over its own ambitions in the last thirty minutes. It wants to be a small, character-driven horror show, then pivots to a heroic last stand that feels like it belongs in a different movie—one that cares more about shocking you than moving you. The comparison to Saving Private Ryan is unavoidable, and Fury clearly wants to be mentioned in the same breath. But where Spielberg used violence as a doorway into human cost, Ayer sometimes uses it as a blunt instrument. The performances are strong, the tank combat is second to none, and the atmosphere is suffocating in the best way. It’s not Come and See, but it’s also not Pearl Harbor. If you can handle the tonal whiplash and the occasional macho posturing, you’ll find a movie that respects its audience enough to leave them feeling dirty. Just don’t expect a clean exit—and don’t expect it to earn every drop of blood it spills.

Trailer: Fury (International)

Posted on by Arleigh

Fury-2014-Movie-Banner-Poster

I must admit that World War II films are a favorite of mine. Even bad ones I tend to enjoy. Whether it’s alternate fantasy fares like Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds or something that combines historical accuracy with dramatic license like Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, the World War II genre always manage to hit straight and true to my film wheelhouse.

This October there looks to be another World War II film that seems almost tailor-fit for me. I’m talking about David Ayer’s follow-up to his underappreciated film End of Watch. This follow-up is Fury and tells the story of an American tank crew in the waning days of World War II in Europe. Just from the two trailer released I already know that I’m seeing this. Ayer looks to be exploring the bond of a tank crew that has seen war from the deserts of Africa and now to the urban and forested landscapes of Germany.

The film is already getting major buzz as a major contender for the upcoming awards season and I, for one, hope that it’s a well-deserved buzz. Even with Shia LaBeouf being part of the cast is not dampening my excitement for this film. Even if it doesn’t live up to the hype I know that I’ll probably still end up enjoying it.

This trailer looks to be selling the utter brutality and carnage of World War II’s final days in Europe when German forces were literally fighting for their homeland and that makes for a desperate enemy (who still had weapons and soldiers that were still hands down better than what the Allies had one-on-one).

On a side note, I like the fact that the tracers in the film actually look like tracers which means they look like freakin’ laser blasts. That’s how tracers behave.

Fury is set to hit theaters on October 17, 2014 in the United States and October 22, 2014 internationally.

Trailer: Battleship (Super Bowl Spot)

Posted on by Arleigh

Battleship is going to be the latest film to come out of that film blockbuster factory called Hasbro Studios. Like them or hate them their Transformers franchise by way of Michael Bay has been anything but flops. They’ve made truckloads of money for all involve despite each successive film in the franchise getting worse and worse. The latest Hasbro property to make it’s way onto the bigscreen will be a big-budget production of that classic naval war boardgame kids of all eras just simply called Battleship.

We’ve seen several trailers of the film now and this Super Bowl Sunday we see a new tv spot trailer which shows more of the alien invasion aspect of the film with more aliens in scifi-looking battle armor being seen. We still don’t know what causes this invasion to occur, but then again most of those who will see this film may not really care as long as the action comes fast and furious with enough of a story to keep things from becoming a huge jumbled mess.

Battleship is still set for a May 18, 2012 release date.

Source: Battleship the Movie