Hamburger Hill

I am not a big fan of war films, and certainly not Vietnam films. Hamburger Hill seems superfluous. Isn't it just one of many Vietnam films in the eighties that cursed this war to high heaven and exposed its pointlessness? Perhaps it is just me who feels that the decade drowned in Vietnam films.

The film does, however, make a commendable attempt to portray a group of soldiers in the Vietnamese jungle without embellishing the truth. The soldiers are to take a hill by any means necessary, but it turns out to be something of a Sisyphean task, because the surface of the hill is nothing but mud, making the soldiers easy targets for the Vietcong. When the hill is finally taken after many days of futile attempts, a large part of the platoon is wounded or dead, all to no purpose whatsoever, as it turns out. The soldiers soon abandon the hill again on orders from above.