I watched Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July (1989) about the real-life story of paralyzed anti-war Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic tonight on Netflix (I don’t have Netflix but am staying at a place with it, and boy, almost everything on the platform is brain-rot garbage). There are spoilers ahead.
1. Stone was a twice-wounded Vietnam vet and did a trilogy of films about it, including Platoon and Heaven & Earth. He knows the material intimately and it shows. Stone also has some deep and idiosyncratic views and I appreciate that about him.
2. It was interesting see Tom Cruise act in a serious role; he mostly pulled it off, but looking back it is pretty hard to separate Cruise the actor from Cruise the Scientologist/Oprah couch jumper - to his detriment, I think. Even back in his early career there was still a kind of cheerful deadness in his eyes which has only gotten worse with time.
3. I didn’t really react to scenes of unintentional U.S. military violence against Vietnamese women and children — not because those actions weren’t terrible but because they’ve become an expected trope of the genre. The two actually emotional scenes were (1) when Cruise cried realizing he could still have physical intimacy/be loved in a way even though he was paralyzed and (2) when Cruise apologized in person to the family of the soldier he accidentally killed (which didn’t happen in real life).
4. Regarding the actual Vietnam war itself, my opinion is as follows: it was a war intentionally set up by globohomo to be lost; fought half a war away (when they could have fought the same war next door in communist Cuba; why didn’t they?) with terrible rules of engagement, the goal was to bleed American blood and treasure in order to clamp down on American patriotism and help pave the way toward a future One World Government. Both America and Vietnam/their Soviet Union sponsors were controlled by the central bank owners. So to watch Kovic go from a pro-war fighter to an anti-war protester — he swings from one side to the other, but he plays into the dialectic on both sides. So I had sympathy watching most of the people and characters in this film — they were just too small-minded and myopic to really understand what they were up against.
5. (One may note that Stone ironically went to Russia a number of years ago to interview Putin from a sympathetic perspective; Stone, too, has no idea that globohomo has controlled Russia since the Tsar was eliminated, and that Putin is one of their puppets.)
Overall I would recommend Born on the Fourth of July with this perspective in mind. Between the strong script, excellent direction, and solid acting, it’s a type of film that can’t be made today and hasn’t been made in a long time.
