FeedThe Steel Helmet
March 30 2009, 9:00pm
After watching this, Fuller's third movie & his first war movie, I'm tempted to make sweeping statements like "there were war movies before Fuller, and war movies after Fuller, and the two are irreversibly different," except I'd hopefully think a little harder and phrase that a little better. But still, it's hard not to see the next 30 (or, hell, 50+) years of war movies encapsulated in this one 85-minute movie.
From the very first scene -- a static shot of a helmet with a bullet hole under the opening credits, which then begins to slowly move as we realize it's on the head of a man, a man crawling on his stomach with his hands tied behind his back -- it's obvious that this is a very different war movie. Fuller took many of his story ideas directly from his own war diary, and there's an immediacy in the storytelling that's perfectly matched by the shot selections & by the raw, fairly naturalistic acting as well.
There were so many amazing moments in this movie, but perhaps none moreso than the sequence in which a captured North Korean major baits first an African-American and then a Japanese-American soldier by poking at their second-class-citizen status in civilian life. Their responses are at once intensely personal but also kind of stilted, and I can't quite figure it out, but the sequence is amazing regardless.
In case it's not apparent, if you think of war movies as being endless series of back-and-forth shooting scenes, this isn't one those (although there are several firefights, including the climactic siege of the temple where the platoon is holed up). It is, rather, a classic war movie in which men from different backgrounds are thrown together and forced to come to terms with all the important questions of life. Some attempt to address them by talking endlessly, and others by keeping quiet, or lashing out.
From the very first scene -- a static shot of a helmet with a bullet hole under the opening credits, which then begins to slowly move as we realize it's on the head of a man, a man crawling on his stomach with his hands tied behind his back -- it's obvious that this is a very different war movie. Fuller took many of his story ideas directly from his own war diary, and there's an immediacy in the storytelling that's perfectly matched by the shot selections & by the raw, fairly naturalistic acting as well.
There were so many amazing moments in this movie, but perhaps none moreso than the sequence in which a captured North Korean major baits first an African-American and then a Japanese-American soldier by poking at their second-class-citizen status in civilian life. Their responses are at once intensely personal but also kind of stilted, and I can't quite figure it out, but the sequence is amazing regardless.
In case it's not apparent, if you think of war movies as being endless series of back-and-forth shooting scenes, this isn't one those (although there are several firefights, including the climactic siege of the temple where the platoon is holed up). It is, rather, a classic war movie in which men from different backgrounds are thrown together and forced to come to terms with all the important questions of life. Some attempt to address them by talking endlessly, and others by keeping quiet, or lashing out.
