User Reviews

It seems to me that the ultimate moral of this story might be that in war everyone is a casualty in some way, shape or form - even those who are never wounded and stay personally above the brutality. "Casualties Of War" is a depiction of an actual (and sickening) event that was first reported in the New Yorker magazine in 1969 in which a squad of American soldiers kidnap, rape and murder an innocent, young Vietnamese girl.

The two main protagonists in the movie are played by Michael J. Fox and Sean Penn. Penn is Meserve - the sargeant in command of the squad who develops the plan for the kidnap, rape and murder. He represents one type of casualty - a kid, promoted way beyond his years, in a situation he should never have been in, watching friends and comrades dying on a daily basis, becoming jaded and unfeeling as a result. You feel no sympathy for his character, but you recognize the tragedy of his character - and of the other members of the squad who let themselves be pulled into the plan. Fox, on the other hand, is Eriksson - the squad's conscience. He knows this is wrong, and he refuses to participate, even trying to help the girl escape, only to be derided and ridiculed by the others as either a coward or a homosexual. After the girl is killed, for no real reason, he reports the incident to his superiors, only to hear repeated variations on the theme "let it go. War is war." This is probably Michael J. Fox's most powerful movie role ever - a definite change of pace from the teen-oriented comedies that had made him famous. He's also a casualty, of course - haunted forever by the sickening scene he had witnessed. And of course, there's the real casualty - the young girl dragged out of her home and away from her mother who endures a nightmare before being killed.

This is most definitely a powerful, disturbing and brutal movie that definitely makes it point.

The odd thing about this film, is that it could've taken place with any background. War, college campus, neighborhood gang. The real plot is about the affects of rape and murder on the good guy and the bad guys. The Vietnam war just happens to be where it really took place, so we are entered into that gritty world of sudden violence, if not sudden death. Fox is a rookie soldier joining Penn's squad. Penn sort of casually mentions that they're gonna find themselves a girl to "keep up morale" while they are on their journey. This involves abducting a young farm girl from her villiage in the middle of the night, not affected in the least by the girl's hysterical mother. Each man (it's a group of 5) has his different reaction, Riley as the dumb "go along with anything" soldier does exactly that, Harvey, in a terrific wacko performance, loves the idea, with Leguizamo and Fox opposed. But Leguizamo, feeling the equivalent of teen peer pressure, does not back Fox when the two want to approach Penn about his antics. So Fox is left in an awkward position the rest of his stay in the field with his squad. There is of course, a confrontation, in a drawn out scene, where toughies Penn and Harvey accuse him of being gay and not doing to the enemy what they deserve. This is the core of the film's impact, as they quarrel, the girl is raped, and then Penn demands that Fox kill her! When she becomes ill, Penn fears her coughing may give away their posistion, so he berates Fox to stab her. He refuses, and in an ensuing arguement, the girl tries to get away, which ends up leading to a chaotic scene in which she reaches a slow, painful demise. The rest of the film deals with Fox trying to bring attention about what happened to his mostly deaf and incompotent superiors. That brief summary, though, barely scratches the surface of the emotionally charged scenes you will experience in the movie. There are many sad moments even before the girl is introduced. And then audience anguish when we think that maybe these men will get away with what they did. The key to the impact is, of course, the performances. Penn is his usual out of control self, who you may feel bad for, seeing how he's such a dedicated soldier and even decent guy before the kidnapping. An underrated and hardly known Don Harvey, I think somewhat outshines Penn with his always angry, scary corporal whose dark eyes and contant scowl give him a great intimidation factor. Riley makes you roll your eyes with his convincing moron, a guy who baffles as to why he'd get into the army, with his I.Q. seeming to be below 40. Leguizamo you try to forgive because of how he's afraid of being attacked verbally, or even physically, by his partners. You can understand his dilemma. Le, as the girl, as expected has little to say, but in her facial expressions, shows us the fright and terror that's enough to jar us. And as far as Fox is concerned, a PERFECT performance and choice for him to show us his dramatic side. He did so sometimes on "Family Ties" and in a couple of cinematic bombs (i.e. "Light of Day", "Bright Lights, Big City") but those works did not nearly approach the powerful scope that this film exhibits. And he puts his dramatic talent on full blast, displaying the mental exhaustion so well, from the disturbing events he went through. It was a very big key to his career when he decided to take this. Some might say how can you make entertainment out of rape, but the one scene of it is only 2 minutes long, with the real story here of how people handle themselves in crisis. The only mis-steps were the sometimes overly violin-ey score, getting a little too weepy here and there. And also the fact that even though Fox is the one good guy of the film, we never find out his first name! But there are too many hard hitting moments of realism to sink this, with the best highlight being the strong acting.

Brian De Palma directed this powerful story that stars Michael J. Fox as Eriksson, one of a five-man unit during the Vietnam war that sees events turn sour, since his unit sees much action, in which he believes civilians were wrongfully killed, but later things take an even more evil turn when the group's "leader" Sgt. Meserve(played by Sean Penn) orders the abduction of a young Vietnamese girl for a group rape. Absolutely appalled, Eriksson refuses to participate, though the only thing he could of done to stop it was shoot them, something he found himself unable to do. After the girl dies, Eriksson reports the incident to the authorities, who eventually charge the men, but Eriksson still finds himself an outcast. Heartbreaking film with excellent performances, though is certainly not easy to watch.

Eriksson sums up the situation perfectly when he says "We're supposed to be helping these people..."

It's not the battle scenes that make this outstanding war drama at times difficult to watch. Michael J. Fox plays PFC Eriksson, the lone voice of morality on an American military squad that kidnaps a frightened young local woman during the Vietnam War. Eriksson finds himself alienated from his fellow soldiers for his objections and refusal to, like them, rape her. After the woman is killed, Eriksson sets out to ensure the truth comes out and that justice is served.

Director Brian De Palma pulled no punches in his handling of the brutal subject matter, based on a true story. It's incredibly emotional, indeed terrifying, to watch the innocent young woman endure this torture. Covered in blood with pain inside and out, her death scene ranks as one of the most agonizing of any war picture. Adding to the tragic power of the film is the fact that we don't know anything about this woman other than the cruel twist of fate dealt to her. She could be your sister, your daughter or your best friend. The mastermind of the kidnapping, played by a scathingly hateful Sean Penn, further intensifies the horror we feel for her.

"Casualties of War" is not quite on par with the all-time great war pictures, but it is guaranteed to stay with you.

Incredibly uneven Vietnam drama from pulp master Brian De Palma. De Palma's the problem here - he's really the kind of director who needs to stay away from serious subject matters, because he's too ham-fisted to handle it with any tact. He does very well with more B-level stuff, and he can definitely be masterful in movies like Carrie and Sisters (though he screws that stuff up as often as not, too). Casualties of War is about a five-person squadron (Michael J. Fox, John Leguizamo, John C. Reilly, Don Harvey and led by Sean Penn) who kidnap a teenage Vietnamese girl, march her into the jungle, rape her and then murder her. Fox is the lone objector in the group, but there's nothing he can do to stop them. He's just a private under Penn's command. Plus, they all have guns and are presumably better at using them than he is. When the group returns from the mission, Fox tries to do the right thing and bring about justice, but his superiors (including Ving Rhames) are mostly unwilling to listen. Yeah, this is powerful stuff. The problem is, De Palma doesn't think we will know that if he just presents it. He has to throw it at us, underlining every little thing, and giving the actors big speeches (one particular shot with Fox seems so clearly to be meant as his Oscar clip that I had to giggle). The worst part of the film by far is the score. Who wrote it? None other than the great Ennio Morricone. I guess everyone has an off day, but I've never heard Morricone deliver a score that was even mediocre (okay, maybe his John Carpenter knock-off score for The Thing). This one is downright putrid. The whole film is terribly overscored. I think that was done to go along with Sean Penn's overacting. The guy's frequently been accused of overdoing it, but generally I think his methody style works. Not here. He's never been worse. By comparison, Michael J. Fox actually isn't half bad. It's pretty clear he wasn't meant for heavy drama, though. Brian De Palma made a startlingly similar movie about the Iraq War in 2007, the even worse Redacted. I know both of these stories are true and they certainly are both subjects worthy of a film treatment, but De Palma was not the one to do it. And, having done both of these movies, it almost seems like he has a beef with U.S. soldiers.

"Casualties of War" forms part of what may be called the cinema's Second Vietnam Cycle. The first came in the late Seventies, immediately after the war itself, with films such as "The Deerhunter", "Coming Home" and "Apocalypse Now". Hollywood then seemed to lose interest in the subject for a few years, but returned to it in the late eighties when there were a number of major Vietnam War films such as "Full Metal Jacket", "Hamburger Hill" and Oliver Stone's trilogy.

The plot centres around five American soldiers who are out on patrol. Their leader, Sergeant Meserve, suggests that they kidnap and rape a young Vietnamese woman, and two of his men eagerly go along with the idea. The others, Privates Diaz and Eriksson, are appalled, and make a pact to oppose the plan. Under pressure from his comrades, however, Diaz gives in and agrees to participate, leaving Eriksson to look on helplessly as the other four men seize the terrified woman from her home and brutally rape her. She is forced by to accompany the men on their patrol, and is later shot and killed by them when her coughing threatens to give them away during an attempted ambush of a band of Viet Cong troops.

Meserve tries to justify his treatment of the girl by claiming that she is a Viet Cong spy, but there is no evidence that she is anything of the sort, and even he himself does not really believe it. The trigger for the incident is Meserve's anger at the death of a comrade in an ambush and at the fact that the Military Police have prevented him from visiting a prostitute, but the underlying reason is that he and his colleagues rape and kill the girl simply because they can, as an expression of the power that they, as armed men, possess over the unarmed villagers. They believe that they will not be punished, and Eriksson's later attempts to have them initially meet with little success, as the officers to whom he speaks are unwilling to take action. The military authorities would prefer to turn a blind eye to war crimes committed by those under their command, believing that to carry out investigations would hamper the conduct of the war and lead to unwelcome publicity. Meserve is regarded as a good soldier, the sort of man that his superiors would be unwilling to lose. He is efficient, brave (we are reminded that on one occasion he saved Eriksson's life) and clearly regarded as having powers of leadership, having been promoted to sergeant at only twenty years of age. A good soldier, however, is not necessarily a good man.

I was interested by the comment from the reviewer who said that this film could have taken place against any background, be it war, college campus or neighbourhood gang. This is partially true. Crimes such as rape can, of course, take place in peacetime as well as wartime, and another movie from the late eighties, "The Accused", took as its theme a gang rape committed by a group of young men in a bar. "Casualties of War", however, is both a film about male violence against women and also something wider than that. It is also a film about how war can lead to a breakdown in civilised values, with soldiers coming to feel that they are immune from the demands of both law and of morality. There is perhaps little about the film that is specific to Vietnam- events similar to those portrayed here have occurred in all wars throughout history- but the unpopularity of that war meant that the film-makers could deal with a subject- war crimes committed by American troops- that in other contexts could have been too controversial to handle. A Second World War film, for example, that showed Allied soldiers raping and murdering a German woman might have been condemned as, at best, unpatriotic and, at worst, pro-Nazi.

I had previously thought of Michael J Fox as a lightweight actor, at his best in comedies and TV sitcoms, so I was surprised to see him taking the lead here as Eriksson. His performance, however, was very good. I was perhaps less impressed by Sean Penn as Meserve, who seemed at times more like a schoolyard bully than a psychopathic war criminal. Penn did, however, have one very good scene where he persuades the other members of his patrol to take part in the kidnap. His superiors were obviously right to think that Meserve had powers of leadership; unfortunately, those powers were applied to perverted ends.

The main fault with the film is its structure. The central part of the film, which documents the actual rape and killing, is very powerful, a harrowing indictment of the brutalities of war. The opening part, however, is slow-moving, and the battle scenes are less convincing than those in, say, "Platoon". I do not agree with the suggestion that I have seen made that the film should have ended with the death of the girl. Given that the film was based on a true story, it was important to show the aftermath of the killings, especially as an important part of the story is the traumatic effect that the incident had on Eriksson, the one 'innocent' member of the patrol. One thing that Fox coveys well is that Eriksson's pursuit of justice is motivated as much by his own feelings of guilt at failing to prevent the woman's death as by moral indignation. The investigation and subsequent court-martial, however, are treated very perfunctorily, and we never really understand why the authorities overcome their initial reluctance to pursue the matter. The opening and closing scenes, which show Eriksson meeting a Vietnamese girl after the war (a prominent newspaper headline referring to Nixon's resignation tells us that the year is 1974), are weak and unnecessary. The result is a film with a weak beginning, strong middle and weak ending. 6/10

While not as good a Vietnam movie as Platoon or Apocalypse Now, Casualties of War nevertheless delivers the emotional punch through DePalma's depiction of how war can truly bring out the worst in people. Similar in content to the village massacre scene of Platoon, Casualties actually hits home with greater force the horrific conduct and depravity of how low these GIs had been morally reduced to. You almost cringe at certain scenes such as Corporal Clark's callous crooning of The Door's "Hello, I love you" while escorting their victim on the march. By being able to fully empathize with Erikson, we feel appauled and helpless as we witness his uncontrolable situation, and can't but help feel a bitter satisfaction when he lays into one of the soldiers with a shovel back at base camp. I felt angry and depressed at how any human being could act the way these soldiers did, and was haunted long after the movie's conclusion. Based on a true story, we realize the true tragedy of what has occurred at the movie's end, when Erikson returns to the present from his flashback and the girl suggets that he had had a "bad dream". The painful reality is that it wasn't just a dream, anymore than the whole Vietnam War was. DePalma examines in great depth not just the ethics concerning warfare, but the values of right and wrong & good and evil, which every single one of us on this planet faces. Just as in Platoon with Charlie Sheen's concluding helicopter voiceover, and Saving Private Ryan's portrayal of the aged Ryan asking his wife "have I been a good man, have I led a good life?", Casualties of War highlights a similar concept when Erikson states that one should never abandon their sense of morality-to cease caring- just because they are surrounded by the possibility of death. Overall you are left with a harrowing feeling that is akin to the likes of having watched Schindler's List or The Killing Fields.