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hyped garbage

Blistering performances.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

It's quite amazing how much was captured on film and photographs and it's put together so well that it almost seems like one was watching a movie of the fall of Saigon - it feels so complete. There are interesting interviews with witnesses mainly military personnel both US and South Vietnamese.Unlike a typical Vietnam war movie this covers a different angle - not about fighting the war but the end of the war. There is criticism of Ambassador Graham Martin's refusal to organize an evacuation till it was too late leading the the chaos that took place. Would have liked to know more of his reasons for being so obstinate and the diplomatic failure at the end.One minor fault is subtitles are in white sometimes against a white background and so hard to make out.This makes one want a follow up on what happened to those left behind beyond the words of epilogue at the end.

One of the ways I personally classify whether a documentary based on famous real-life events is good or not is whether I learn something new about it. For example, I didn't think the Robert McNamara movie, "The Fog of War" was good, because it just regurgitated things I already knew about Vietnam. Last Days in Vietnam, however, showed me new things that I didn't know about and found interesting. I won't list them all here, but the most fascinating thing for me (and they even had footage of it!), was all the South Vietnamese helicopters that landed on the aircraft carrier to leave the country, and because they couldn't store the helicopters anywhere, the military had to push them into the ocean so the next one could land.As an American who grew up during this time, Vietnam is still a raw experience for many of us. It was refreshing to see how many Americans felt responsible for the South Vietnamese, and tried to get as many of them out of there. You never really hear very much about those kinds of stories.Because of her family name, Rory Kennedy carries lots of baggage, mostly good, but some bad. However, along with the very personal documentary about her mother Ethel, she is proving to be very, very capable in this genre. I look forward to seeing more of her work in the future.

This documentary gives us a lot of hand-wringing and conscience-searching about "doing the right thing" towards the thousands of southern Vietnamese who had collaborated with the American war effort. We are made to feel the gut-wrenching decisions made by Americans as to who would be evacuated and who would be left behind to face retaliation for their collaboration with the enemy. And, in the end, we are meant to feel re-assured that Americans are good people at heart, who "truly cared" about the fate of the inhabitants of southern Vietnam. But this story of the human tragedy that unfolded over a few days in late April 1975 is a deceptive snapshot of the big picture. Vietnam had been a united country for centuries before the defeat of the French in 1954 (France had occupied Vietnam as a colony of the French Empire since 1887). The Geneva Accords of 1954, which ended domination by the French, specified a temporary division of the country into a north and south--with the provision that elections would be held within 2 years to reunify the country. But Pres. Eisenhower admitted, "I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, a possible 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader." And so the US and its puppet regime in the south saw to it that no elections were held. The so-called Republic of South Vietnam was a corrupt regime that had virtually no legitimacy, even in the south. It was comprised of elites drawn from the very small Catholic minority (6-8%), collaborationists with the previous French colonial regime, high-ranking military officers, wealthy landowners, and the businessmen, large and small, who had contractual dealings with the US. Its narrow base of support in the population meant that sooner or later the US would have to intervene militarily in a massive way in order to prop it up--which is what Pres. Johnson ordered, beginning in 1963. And so, for more than 10 years the US ravaged Vietnam to keep it from "going Communist". There are still people in the US who think we should have gone further in the carnage and devastation of that small country in order to "win the war" and "save Vietnam from the Communists"--though one wonders how many people would have been left to save and what would have been left of Vietnam as a habitable place if we had unleashed the full destructive force of the US military. As it was, nearly 3 million Vietnamese were killed, hundreds of thousands wounded and maimed for life, entire cities laid to waste, and a countryside left infested with toxic agents and land mines.Once the US discovered that the Vietnam War was destroying morale and discipline among its own troops (who, finding themselves surrounded on all sides by "the enemy", lashed out by committing scores of war crimes against the civilian population of Vietnam--see the My Lai massacre as an example), even the war hawks of the Nixon administration realized it was time for an "exit strategy". But shortly after the US pull-out, the morale of the army of the so-called Republic of South Vietnam dropped through the floor--and that should have come as no surprise since most of its soldiers had either been press-ganged into service or were there just to collect their paycheck. That army simply disintegrated in the face of Vietnamese who knew what they were fighting for: to liberate their country from a foreign invader.So now we can return to the meaning of those last days in April 1975. All of that hand-wringing and conscience-searching--a truly sincere desire on the part of Americans to "do the right thing" towards the Vietnamese whose lives we had compromised--falls terribly short of the mark. What is lacking is a recognition that we as Americans were responsible for that horror--and not just during the "last days in Vietnam". Both the director and the people she interviewed seemed oblivious to the fact that what happened in those last days was the playing-out of the final scene of more than 10 years of incalculable suffering and hardship we had inflicted on the people of Vietnam.

The most impressive aspect about Rory Kennedy's Last Days In Vietnam is the wealth of archive footage it has to offer. I marvel at the time investment she must have had to link every shot to a real life anecdote. As such, the documentary does a great job of making those stories come to life. But ultimately it's quite limited. I can see why the Academy liked it, moreso than Life Itself anyway, it's essentially similar to Argo where people are escaping volatile places. And like Argo it focuses on that moment of release rather than any context or consequence, besides the ending results. The film feels like a similar story over and over with little development, though they are interesting in their own right. It's got a very standard documentary approach with its interviews and the emotion, and while it's easy to empathise, it's rather basic rather than conflicted and complex. A good doc but a small missed opportunity for more insightful greatness.7/10