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By
TERESSA ELLIOTT
A servicable, but overly long depiction of an early battle in the Vietnam War (what is it about
war films that causes filmmakers to throw out their stopwatch and make the battles too long for audience interest?).
Mel Gibson stars as Harold (Hal) Moore--a Lt. Colonel who thinks of his "green" troop as his kids and vows to be the
first man on the battlefield and the last one off. The first part of the film details the stateside training, but the
bulk of the film is the extended battle sequence.
While the battle scenes are exciting and gory, they go on a bit too long. The battle is intercut with a couple scenes of
the wives back home getting bad news of wartime loss which is effective -- it might have worked better to focus a bit
more on these wives and the families left behind.
The extras include a twenty-five minute behind-the-scenes that is thankfully more than an extended trailer, ten deleted
scenes that can be played with or without the director/writer's commentary (Randall Wallace, the director and writer of
the film, explains that each scene cut was one he would have liked to retain -- now we know why the film was too long)
and an audio commentary with Wallace. |
