Placement On Sight & Sound 50 Best Movies List: #14
Every single war in human history is a brutal affair from which no participant in it comes away unscathed. But the Vietnam War took on a whole other life of its own that made it a particularly gruesome affair. New innovations in cameras and TV news allowed people to see grisly first-hand footage directly from the battlefield, once that footage was actually allowed to be aired on TV that is. People were getting an up-close glimpse at the harshness of war for the first time and the fact that the Vietnam war ended in a loss for America only added a further layer of tragedy to what was already a cataclysmic affair.
