From ‘Platoon’ to ‘Apocalypse Now’

Fifty years ago this week the fall of Saigon brought the Vietnam War to an end. We all know it best from the movies. And while it’s usually the winners who get to tell the story of a war, Hollywood’s primacy gives Vietnam’s filmography an American flavour – from valorising propaganda flick like The Green Berets to war-is-hell slaughterfests like Hamburger Hill, via a host of homecoming dramas like The Deer Hunter and Born on the Fourth of July. The Vietnamese have their own equivalents, though, and films like The Girl From Hanoi capture the country’s harrowing experiences.

But which films really get the conflict? We asked military historian Professor Geoffrey Wawro, author of acclaimed account The Vietnam War, to rank the most accurate depictions of the conflict. ‘The canon of Vietnam films gives us a lot of different views on the conflict,’ he tells us. So is the Vietnam war movie a thing of the past? ‘Well, no one expected Spike Lee to take up the story [with 2020’s Da 5 Bloods],’ he adds, ‘but he saw an interesting angle to pursue and made a great movie. Vietnam is a useful device for talking about the arrogance and blindness of power.’

Recommended: 

 The 50 best war movies ever made
 The 50 best World War II movies
 World War I films ranked by historical accuracy

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