Hamburger Hill

1987 "War at its worst. Men at their best."
6.7| 1h50m| R| en| More Info
Released: 23 August 1987 Released
Producted By: Paramount Pictures
Country: United States of America
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website:
Synopsis

The men of Bravo Company are facing a battle that's all uphill… up Hamburger Hill. Fourteen war-weary soldiers are battling for a mud-covered mound of earth so named because it chews up soldiers like chopped meat. They are fighting for their country, their fellow soldiers and their lives. War is hell, but this is worse. Hamburger Hill tells it the way it was, the way it really was. It's a raw, gritty and totally unrelenting dramatic depiction of one of the fiercest battles of America's bloodiest war. This happened. Hamburger Hill - war at its worst, men at their best.

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Reviews

Matialth Good concept, poorly executed.
ChicRawIdol A brilliant film that helped define a genre
Plustown A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.
Leoni Haney Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.
jasonam Few films have managed to capture the horrors of the Vietnam War as accurately as Hamburger Hill in terms of real history. Inspired by an actual battle that in many aspects typifies the entire conflict, John Irvin brings to life the brutal realities of combat. Carefully weaving in social commentary while at the same time not shying away from gruelling scenes of battle, this film stands above many others in its genre.
playbobbie13 In watching this movie for the first time years ago I was struck by the authenticity these actors brought to the movie! I found out years later that the actors were put through some rigorous training by the movies technical adviser to be prepared for the filming of this picture. It shows in their portrayal. The choice of filming in the Philippines was smart too! They sold it as really being in Vietnam! The technical language they used, the raw emotion they portrayed all came together to make you fee like you were seeing the real thing. The one thing above all others I truly respected was the camaraderie portrayed by these actors! Something special happened in this movie that is worth watching!
dworldeater I would regard Hamburger Hill as the most realistic and least appreciated of the big three Vietnam War films that came out the same time. The other two films in question are Full Metal Jacket and Platoon. Full Metal Jacket is my favorite and Platoon is a classic as well. Hamburger Hill in my opinion is as good as Platoon, but has different themes and a lower budget. Hamburger Hill is the story of a platoon of soldiers and the battle of Hamburger Hill. There really is'nt a focus on any one character as lead actor, but the platoon as a whole and what they go through on the battle to take the hill. I think the ensemble cast did a hell of a job and were very believable as combat soldiers. For me the standout performances were from Dylan Mc Dermott (Frantz) and Courtney B Vance(Doc). Hamburger Hill really does an excellent job at showing the horrors of war, keeping it real and gritty as possible. The film comments on racism and the anti war movement at home. The main focus is on the unit doing the best they can to stay alive and take the hill. The battle scenes are brutal and very realistic. Hamburger Hill was written and produced by Vietnam War vet Jim Carabotos. The film is very non glamorized and comes across as a honest depiction of events. I've always enjoyed the film and Hamburger Hill still holds up. I have a lot of respect for this movie and regard this highly.
tieman64 "Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down." - Woodrow Wilson "Let me tell you about your blood, bamboo kid, it ain't Coca Cola, it's rice. Go straight to hell boys. Go straight to hell." - The Clash Directed by John Irvin, and based loosely on a true story, "Hamburger Hill" follows a US Brigade as it launches an assault on a well-fortified position occupied by the North Vietnamese Army during the Vietnam war.Shot on location in the Philippines, "Hill's" first act is its strongest. Here we watch as a band of US soldiers fill sandbags, lounge in trenches, monitor a river passage and journey to nearby brothels. These sequences are well shot, boast some fine location photography and competently capture the tempo of both local life and military R and R. And where most Vietnam war flicks portray Vietnam as but an unending jungle, "Hill" does well to clearly map out the three main geographical spheres of the war: "allied" territory in South Vietnam (a mixture of urban spaces and small villages), the always moving border between north and south, and the chaotic jungles to the north, often accessible only by helicopter."Hill's" second act watches as a squad, led by Adam Frantz (Dylan McDermott), attempts to take the aforementioned hill (Hill 937). We then get sequences in which unsympathetic journalists are berated and disgruntled grunts talk about being spat on by anti-war protesters. These sequences set up the film's limited, "love the troops" philosophy. Next comes much generic grunt banter and a final act which amounts to but the usual war porn, soldiers yelling for medics, dodging bullets, throwing grenades and being perforated by lead. This is all presented as a noble but horrible sacrifice and war is again reduced to but an apolitical game fought for the buddy next to you.Unsurprisingly, "Hamburger" neglects to mention how strategically superfluous taking Hill 937 was, and how the US military abandoned 937 promptly after taking it. Irvin also ignores the fact that the NVA had barely a couple hundred men holding the hill, whilst the US military threw almost two thousand men at it, including huge levels of hardware (artillery, hundreds of air-force missions, helicopters etc). In Irvin's hands, this is a battle between a small group of Americans and an unending horde of Asian savages. Maintaining this underdog illusion is largely why you rarely see footage of US super-bombers carpet bombing Vietnam.All wars are based on some kind of lie. In terms of US history, you had two Gulf Wars and an Afghanistan invasion based on lies (WMDS, the Nurse Nayirah fiasco, faked baby incubators, faked al-Qaeda links etc), you had the lie of Spaniards mining the USS Maine to justify the colonisation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii and the Philippines, and you had similar fabrications used to spearhead hundreds of bloody actions across Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. In terms of Vietnam, you had the bogus Golf of Tonkin incidents and faked bombings in Saigon blamed on "communists". The US media at the time was complicit in selling these lies. Indeed, sociologist George Bayley, who mapped media coverage during the era, found that barely 3 percent of all network news "recorded" the "enemy" viewpoint (as well as minimising the impact of the war and the opposition it arouse), a graphic illustration of the media's one-sided stance. Bayley also found that virtually all daily combat reports were sourced from the army's public relations department, which in 1971 alone spent two hundred million dollars trying to improve the army's image.Today, Vietnam is still portrayed as a pseudo-romantic little blunder, rather than a calculated slaughter (philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre would spend years pushing for the war to be classed as a "genocide"). That the US armed, funded and backed French Imperialism in Vietnam is ignored, that it was constantly asked by the Vietnamese (as early as the 1920s and 30s) for assistance is ignored, as is the fact that the Vietnamese were constantly begging for help implementing a US styled Constitution (a nation whom the Vietnamese revolutionaries admired). After these betrayals, the US artificially divided the country (sanctioned via various international puppet bodies), flew in puppet dictators, did its best to scuttle all local elections and did its best to ignore the fact that even the South wanted it out.In the meantime, the largest bombing campaign in the history of the planet was green-lit (8 million tons of bombs dropped onto the peoples of Indochina by the United States), 3-5 million Vietnamese were killed by aggressive force (and over 100,000 Cambodians by US bombs, with defunct bombs still regularly exploding), and the largest aerial spraying of chemical weapons was rubber stamped, including 11.2 million gallons of Agent Orange and 400,000 tons of napalm. Millions would suffer from generations-spanning mutations, full-body disfigurement, undernourishment, chemical infestation, mental illness and trauma and even today over 100,000 Vietnamese are born mutated. The Pentagon itself estimates that 4.8 million Vietnamese people were exposed to Agent Orange, resulting in 400,000 deaths/disabilities, and 500,000 children born with defects. All this saturation bombing, the tens of thousands killed by political assassination and counter-terrorism programs, the routine "headshot" killings of civilians, the calculated killing of crops (almost 20 percent of the forested area of Vietnam was chemically castrated), burning of villages and destruction of industrial infrastructure, is routinely ignored by Vietnam War films. Instead they do what "Hamburger Hill" does; woe is white man.7/10 – See instead: "Go Tell the Spartans", "Full Metal Jacket", "The Quiet American", Pontecorvo's "Burn!", "Walker", "Tigerland", "Winter Soldier", "In The Year of the Pig", "Hearts and Minds", "Paths of Glory", "Southern Comfort" and "Casualties of War".