January 23, 2006 – “Hamburger Hill” is the true tale of the U.S. Army’s ten day battle with the North Vietnamese to take Hill 937, and more importantly the men who fought and died to take it. Hill 937 earned the nickname Hamburger Hill for the propensity of enemy fire to be so fierce as to turn assaulting troops into shredded hamburger meat. As we open the film, we meet the group of soldiers whose travails we’ll follow just prior to the Hill 937 mission. They are a mixture of hardened veterans and soft newbies, and there are a lot of recognizable faces among the mix, although many of them are so young in this that you almost don’t recognize them, including Michael Boatman (“Spin City”), Don Cheadle (“Hotel Rwanda”), Dylan McDermott (“The Practice”), Courtney B. Vance (“Space Cowboys”), and Steven Weber (“Wings”).
“Hamburger Hill”‘s a pretty good film. It does its job solidly, but I wouldn’t rank it among the upper echelon war films, by any means. I mean, it was neat seeing actors I know from today back when they were younger, but, and I don’t know if this was because of poor filmmaking or just me, I found it kind of hard at times, especially early on in the film, keeping up with who was who amongst the soldiers, except for, of course, the actors I already knew. Confusion, though, seemed to be a running theme throughout “Hill”, because not only don’t you always know who is who, but you don’t really know why they even have to take Hill 937 in the first place, and scarily enough neither do they, and that’s a microcosm of the entire Vietnam Conflict, in my opinion. And speaking of conflicts, there are A LOT of those within the story, even before we get into the real nitty-gritty battle scenes, such as the vets versus the rookies, black soldiers versus white soldiers, and friendly locals versus the enemy ones. And it all makes for an interesting and realistic yarn, but I’ve always thought that realism in the viewing of any tale, especially films, is relative and depends a great deal on point of view, because even the people that were there don’t know every point of view of the war. Every soldier had his own view of events, so there’re a lot of versions of realistic. Honestly, and I know I just mentioned this, but the main theme I saw running throughout “Hamburger Hill” and also through a lot of tales that look back on Vietnam is that no one knows why they’re there or to repeat a line of dialogue from “Alfie” that I often like to, “What’s it all about?”