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In Reply to: RE: Yup. H H was as forgettable as it was watch-able. nt posted by tinear on December 21, 2010 at 14:15:30
but damned if I can recall much detail regarding any character. I do remember the black dude with the horn rimmed glasses, "Doc" I think. Contrast that with Defoe's, Berenger's, McGinley's, Dillon's, and Sheen's, characters from platoon, burned into memory forever.
"I'd like to own a squadron of tanks"
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Platoon is a caricature, a political piece of crap, your usual Hollywood fair with stars dominating the screen. A couple of personal stories, that's all...
HH is far more impersonal and hence real. I don't know where the obsession with "character development" comes from. Why is it mandatory for someone to change his behavioral pattern in the span of 90 minutes? THAT should be considered artificial, not the portrayal of real life.
HH is about the brutal meat grinder, far less about who and how got thrown into it. It shows bigger picture, with very little minutiae. For the lovers of personal stories there seems to be enough, in my view. But those who lived through wars usually mention how your personality becomes smaller, subservient to something far bigger and more important. Like everything in life there is proper balance, and if HH errs on the side of bigger picture, there surely is no shortage of the more "personal" films - no need to expect everyone conform to the same cookie cutter.
If it was a big picture movie, then it should have given us more of the big picture (ie. the strategic importance of the hill, the top brass decision making behind its taking, how the NVA/VC would have been affected by its loss, etc). It wasn't a big picture movie at all because it concerned itself solely with the guys in the platoon who were tasked with taking the hill.
All in all, it was a sloppy screenplay. The Doc death scene was an exercise in cliche, as was the Dear John letter and the brothel scene. You need more depth to a screenplay when basically all you have is a movie about a bunch of guys crawling up a hill under gunfire. HH *could* have been a really great movie, maybe the defining Vietnam war movie. The taking of the hill should have been worked into a larger whole, because without the fighting on the hill there wasn't really anything else in the movie which was noteworthy.
There's no real coda to the movie either, either physical, psychological or metaphysical. Contrast that with Platoon, which resolved many different conflicts in its final act (yes, I know you hated Platoon, but give it some credit).
Anyway, you've got me thinking, so I will watch it again soon (it would make a great Christmas day movie, don't you think).
Good discussion, actually! There is no single right answer, just like in life.
usually don't care what happens to them. "Oh, all those guys getting chopped up..."
I mean, that's what you expect in a war film, no? What makes it interesting to most people IS the personal side. In the 2 Kubrick war films, you realize the brutality specifically because you feel you know the characters.
To know the character, and to see him "develop" are different things. One doesn't mean the other, the time scope might be short, and circumstances completely dominating, etc.
Furthermore, some war movies take more of a bird eye approach, where very few, if any, characters are defined to any serious degree. Yet that doesn't prevent us from seeing the ugly truth of what is happening.
Making you fall in love with a character, only to see him later die a horrible death - is this not a manipulation? Acceptable and accepted, perhaps, but manipulation nonetheless. Injecting some personal story into each war movie - is it really necessary? Conceivably one could envision a film where the main character was just an observer, and nothing bad happened to him, it was all other nameless people who got chopped up. The overall impression would be different, more of the epic type panorama, but it would still be a war film.
So nothing is wrong per se with identifiable characters, and their... ahem... development, I just don't see it as mandatory.
To me the guys in HH were quite real, development or not. Real enough to make the viewer feel the pain of their departure... and that is sufficient, in my book.
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