david-slattery Just been on vacation to Vietnam and visited the My Lai memorial,a deeply moving experience.In my opinion, this was a cheap and nasty attempt to recreate the story of the massacre.I hated the attempts to 'Hollywoodize' the story.There were feeble attempts to introduce a fictional love story which just cheapened the whole story.Most of the time, the villagers sounded more American than the Americans, except when they suddenly switched to Vietnamese for no apparent reason! The standard of acting was appalling and wooden. The dialogue was inane and most of the effects were pathetic.This film is an insult to the people who died at My Lai. One to avoid.

pusite147 Seriously through, don't even waste time to watch it. Most of the actors can't even act, and yet it is very disturbing. Dialogue and camera shot are the worst and i can't believe they spent €2,000,000 on this crap.Casting is also very awful. They hired Filipino actress to play the leading role which is very ridiculous and it shows her weird Vietnamese accent. They should have hired Vietnamese to play this role instead of her. Well I don't have a problem with her acting, but I think they should cast "Right people" to play the "Right Role"It's just worst and worst, don't watch it!

Albert Muick And those are the good points! Paolo Bertola has allegedly spent 2 million Euro on this piece of epic fail and has nothing to show for it.I have previously written (ad nauseum, I guess) how offensive I find it when they can't even get uniforms right. Well, these jibronis (sp?) can't even tell which service they are in, calling themselves Marines. They are in green fatigues with some hand-made unit patch (often on the wrong shoulder!). These do not even begin to approximate the patch that 2LT William Calley wore. Further, look at the officer's ranks. They are at least 3x the normal size and were obviously hand-made. They spent all that money and can't even get the uniforms right? What special effects? The smoke was CGI for god's sake! There were even CGI helicopters! There were several good explosions and some good blood and carnage, however, military protocol and procedure for a combat zone was not followed. Further, people do not scream for hours and hours, or grab hold of a rifle sling to be pulled to safety when both of their legs have been blown off. They bleed out. They die. I've seen combat and I've paid the Price of the Eagle. It's one of the most bone-jarring and horrifying experiences I have ever had in my life and I do not sleep well from it.Damnit, if you're going to make a movie about Vietnam or any war, at least hire some people who have been there and can tell you what it was like and how it should be represented. Spend some money on quality props and actors.What is is about Italian cinema that they always manage to screw up when they try to make a movie about Vietnam? The same thing goes for the latest zombie trash, Eaters, which was also an Italian job. It's unrealistic, full of impossible situations and innuendo unique to the Italian mind. Some things should just be kept within a country's borders. This film is one of them.It is my belief that this film was made and released around the time of the anniversary of the My Lai massacre solely to capitalize on the human misery of the situation. It was not factual and does not represent anyone who was on the battlefield that day in any accurate form.

demelewis As many may be aware, the massacre at the Son My hamlets of My Lai and My Khe in early 1968 by elements of the 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, is the most well-known of several massacres of Vietnamese civilians carried out by US forces during the Vietnam war.The incident itself was largely a legacy of the draft for Vietnam and the one year 'tour of duty' policy, which bled away experienced career soldiers from the fight, resulting in the drafting and training of poor quality officers to fill the gaps; men who were often completely unsuitable for command. These men were then told that 'the body count' was their yardstick of success, setting the stage for indiscriminate killing of civilians to become widespread when soldiers were out on patrol under such leadership. Such a culture meant that the My Lai massacre might never come to light at all had it not been for the brave actions of a reconnaissance helicopter crew who, upon witnessing the carnage taking place, landed at the village and put a stop to matters, and even then the military attempted to cover it up.So, a deep subject then, quite relevant too given that there is a 'new Vietnam' in Afghanistan; thus one deserving of serious treatment if a drama is to be made about the matter, and one from which we might learn something too if it was done right. Films about war atrocities are certainly not easy to make and often not easy to watch either, but Schindler's List proves that it can be done. Which makes it particularly staggering to find that this movie is not so much a serious attempt to tell the tale with the kind of gravitas it warrants, but rather more like bad action movie to the extent that it is actually laughable. That in itself is a remarkable achievement; to make a film about such an horrendous event that - for all the wrong reasons - can actually make you laugh at its ineptitude. We should be crying whilst watching a movie about this subject material! Being interested in the Vietnam war, I had hoped this would be a film which might dare to examine the motivations and singular scapegoating of William Calley. To put the spotlight of justice on his superior officers in perpetrating such a terrible deed, to question the cover ups and policies which led to such an appalling turn of events, and to take a really good long look at the morality of soldiers in combat when they are pressured to deliver a body count. But nooo - from the cheap, nasty backdrop of frankly inept CGI UH-1D helicopters, to the woefully poor acting and casting, plus a terrible script, cookie-cutter soundtrack, poor storytelling and editing that is all over the place, this film is like a masterclass on how not to make a movie and - criminally - an opportunity missed to make something that could have been a genuinely worthy piece of self-examinatory film-making with regard to military policies.Some of the close up camera work and lighting is okay to be fair, but then the 'actors' open their wooden mouths and attempt some of the atrociously bad dialogue and we're firmly brought back to FNG film-making territory once more. Couple this with the fact that several Vietnamese villager characters randomly switch between speaking subtitled Vietnamese and English for no readily discernible reason and the bewilderment continues. The result is that if you haven't stopped your DVD player and decided the DVD of this movie would serve you better as a drinks coaster, then you actually can't wait for the soldiers to get on with slaughtering the rotten actors playing the villagers just so the sound of frag grenades and gunfire will drown out the risible dialogue and offer a welcome smoke screen to mask am-dram standard 'acting'.This isn't just the worst movie about the Vietnam war, it's the worst movie of all time. Moreover it's an insult to the victims of the real event. Avoid this DVD at all costs, that is unless you need a drinks coaster.