Publications Index | Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’s Internet Archive
Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 172 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 172, February 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Heaven and Earth
Dir: Oliver Stone
Finally Hollywood has produced a film from a Vietnamese woman’s point of view. Heaven and Earth is the final part of Oliver Stone’s Vietnam trilogy, and like Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July it is beautifully made.
It is based on the true story of Le Ly Haslip, who finds her village destroyed by the French and then by the Americans. She is raped by members of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), who believe her a spy, and is left outcast by both Vietnamese and American society.
On some levels it is a powerful film. Stone exposes the brutality of the American war machine. US soldiers are shown burning villages and throwing prisoners from helicopters. Even Haslip’s future husband is a secret American agent torturing and murdering civilians.
However, the film is ultimately unsatisfactory. With the exception of Haslip, Stone fails to develop his characters. None of them can be related to and most remain stereotypes: the fanatical NVA, the cruel American GI or the mixed-up GI. Everything is reduced to being good or evil.
It was once said that America’s biggest monument to the Vietnam War was the 100,000 former servicemen locked away in mental institutions. The war left a generation of men scarred emotionally and physically. Stone, a war veteran himself, is trying to answer, why did the war happen?
He ends up relating to the person trapped in the middle – the grunt in Platoon, the disabled marine in Born on the Fourth of July or the peasant in Heaven and Earth. By portraying the war as a battle between good and evil, Stone leads himself to a dead end.
The real motivation for the war was imperialism, to preserve US dominance in south east Asia. In the end, Stone hasn’t made a film from the viewpoint of the Vietnamese, he has fudged it. Even today, the war opens up too many wounds for American society. The weaknesses of Heaven and Earth show that Hollywood will not make such a film.
Socialist Review Index | ETOL Main Page
Last updated: 7 March 2017