It was made fairly recently. It's allegedly about Guadalcanal. A green Army (Army not Marine) unit is landed on Guadalcanal. They move up to the line, get ordered to assault an enemy held hill, and most of 'em get killed. All the officers come across as nut cases. We have conversations between one star generals and bird colonels, bird colonels and captains that would provoke court martials for all hands in the real world. Nobody wears insignia of rank, making it hard for us viewers to figure out who is giving orders and who is taking orders. The hill is covered with fantastic shoulder high grass, thicker than any grass I ever saw in Viet Nam. It's so thick and lush that they could have taken the enemy position by belly crawling thru the grass. They would have been totally invisible. Instead they all stand up, start running forward into enemy fire, and all get shot for their pains.
Another down check, we never learn the names of any of the characters. They probably give names once or twice, but not often enough or clear enough for this couch potato to catch 'em. The movie shows Guadalcanal as a tropical South Pacific paradise with brown skinned native girls, colorful parrots, dugout canoes and grass huts. No one who fought on Guadalcanal had anything good to say for the place. All the letters home and memoirs talk about is heat, mud, bugs, enemies, snakes, booby traps, and artillery barrages, a genuine hell hole, not Bali Hai from the musical South Pacific.
The purpose of a war movie is to show a protagonist thrown into a dreadful situation, have him master the situation somehow, and learn from it and grow a bit. Nothing like that happens. We don't even have the satisfaction of seeing the more obnoxious characters take a bullet.
Bad flick. We turned it off three quarters of the way thru to watch the Great Debate.
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