Review of The Boys in Company C (1978) by Mjs M — 07 Oct 2009

When this was first recommended to me I had never heard of it, which is odd because I?ve always been a fan of movies about Vietnam. In many ways this is a forgotten film and I think that might be because The Deer Hunter came out the same year and eclipsed it. Really this suffers in comparison to a lot of Vietnam movies; it?s not as thoughtful as The Deer Hunter, as intense as Apocalypse Now, as authentic as Platoon, or as smart as Full Metal Jacket, but view on its own it has its merits. Of all the films I just mentioned, Full Metal Jacket is probably the one it has the closest kinship to, as it has a similar format of showing G.I.s as they are trained and follows them into the battlefield. It even has R. Lee Ermey in a small role as a drill sergent (though he?s not anywhere near as good as he was in the Kubrick film). Unlike Full Metal Jacket this lacks a consistent tone, I think it struggles to decide whether it wants to be a satire or a straightforward war film, if it?s trying to be the later it probably doesn?t work to great, if it?s trying to be the former it works better but it?s not as good as other anti-war films of the era like M*A*S*H or Catch-22.

I didn?t really find the characters overly interesting and the story is a pretty standard ?tour of duty? type thing. I felt like the movie was really treading water for most of its runtime, but then came the film?s climactic propaganda soccer game. At first this scene seemed really silly, but it eventually developed into a pretty smart allegory for the war itself, and that in many ways redeemed the film for me.