28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
10 of the greatest Vietnam war movies, from Apocalypse Now to Full Metal Jacket
The Vietnam war cast a long shadow across one of the most fertile periods of American filmmaking, and for the half-century since it ended, filmmakers have reckoned with its complicated legacy.
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These 10 films, assembled to mark the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, range from indelible anti-war classics to Vietnamese portraits of resistance, capturing the vastness of the war's still-reverberating traumas.
1. The Big Shave (1967)
A 25-year-old Martin Scorsese made this six-minute short. In it, a man simply shaves himself before a sink and a mirror. After a few nicks and cuts, he does not stop, continuing until his face is a bloody mess – a neat but gruesome metaphor for Vietnam.
Peter Bernuth in a still from The Big Shave (1967).
2. The Little Girl of Hanoi (1974)
A young girl (Lan Huong) searches for her family in the bombed-out ruins of Hanoi in Hai Ninh's landmark of Vietnamese cinema. It is a work of wartime propaganda but also of aching humanity.
3. Hearts and Minds (1974)
Controversy greeted Peter Davis' landmark documentary around its release, but time has only proved how sober and clear-eyed it was. Newsreel clips and home front interviews are contrasted with the horrors on the ground in Vietnam in this penetrating examination of the gulf between American policy and Vietnamese reality.
4. The Deer Hunter (1979)
Arguably the pre-eminent American film about the Vietnam war, no other movie more grandly or tragically charts the American evolution from innocence to disillusionment than Michael Cimino's devastating epic about working-class friends (Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, John Savage) from a Pennsylvania steel town drafted into war.
5. Apocalypse Now (1979)
Apocalypse Now, which transposes Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to the Vietnam war, is an epic of madness that teeters on the brink of hallucination. More faithful to Conrad than to Vietnam, Apocalypse Now does not so much illuminate the chaos and moral confusion of the war as elevate it to a grandiose nightmare.
6. Platoon (1986)
The 1980s saw a wave of Hollywood films about Vietnam. Foremost among them is the Oscar best picture-winning Platoon, which Oliver Stone wrote based on his own experiences as an infantryman in Vietnam. Widely acclaimed for its realism, Stone's film remains among the most intensely vivid and visceral dramatisations of the war.
7. Full Metal Jacket (1987)
Stanley Kubrick should be more often thought of as the supreme anti-war moviemaker. Split between the harrowing boot-camp tyranny of R. Lee Ermey's drill instructor and the urban violence of the 1968 Tet Offensive, Full Metal Jacket fuses both ends of the war machine.
8. Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997)
How former soldiers lived with their experience in Vietnam has been a subject of many fine films. In Werner Herzog's non-fiction gem, he profiles the astonishing story of German-American pilot Dieter Dengler. In the film, Dengler recounts – and sometimes re-enacts – his experience being shot down over Laos, captured and tortured and then escaping.
9. The Fog of War (2003)
Former US defence secretary and Vietnam war architect Robert McNamara sat for interviews with documentarian Errol Morris. The result is a chilling reflection on the thinking that led to one of America's greatest follies. It is not a mea culpa but a thornier and more disquieting rumination on how rationalised ideology can lead to the deaths of millions.
10. The Post (2017)
Steven Spielberg's stirring film dramatises The Washington Post's 1971 publishing of the Pentagon Papers, a collection of classified documents that chronicled America's 20-year involvement in Southeast Asia. While government analyst Daniel Ellsberg could be considered the hero of this story,
The Post turns its focus to Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep) and the wartime role of the media.
