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Category:    Home > Reviews > Drama > War > Vietnam > Political > History > Born On The Fourth Of July (HD-DVD)

Born On The Fourth Of July (HD-DVD)

 

Picture: B+     Sound: B     Extras: C+     Film: B

 

 

In his rise as one of the most important directors alive, Oliver Stone decided to adapt Ron Kovic’s autobiography about his experience in Vietnam, his blind faith prior to going and the terrible aftermath that made him fight the undeclared war at great personal cost to himself.  The film was made as a sort of flipside to his hugely successful Platoon (1986) and the real coup of Born On The Fourth Of July (1989) is that Stone landed Tom Cruise to play Kovic.

 

Cruise was looking for respectability and got it, delivering another career-changing performance as a young man who loves his country so much, he does not need to be drafted since he simply signs up.  Told chronologically and without the pretense of flashback, we see the Kovic Family and their happy life together.  After his stint in Nam, he returns and finds he really cannot go home again as the country is in upheaval.

 

Once a young man who believed all the propaganda about conformity without thinking about, he is paralyzed and can no longer walk.  Wheelchair-bound, he has to deal with his dysfunctional family, denial about exactly how things happened and slowly becomes politicized when he cannot live a lie anymore as the country erupts over how unacceptable the Vietnam situation is.

 

At 145 minutes, the film never seems that long and is one of Stone’s better films as he was gaining power as an important auteur in the middle of the first Reagan/Bush years.  Cruise received a Best Actor Oscar nomination and proved that he could carry a serious film like this on his own and not just hold his own with great actors like Paul Newman and Dustin Hoffman.  It was also one of the best films in a very bad year like 1989 and has aged well.  Kyra Sedgwick, Frank Whaley, Caroline Kava, Tom Berenger, Stephen Baldwin and Willem Dafoe also star.

 

The 1080p VC-1 2.35 X 1 digital High Definition image was shot by Director of Photography Robert Richardson, in real anamorphic Panavision and it looks good in this fine transfer.  Before it fell apart, the Stone/Richardson collaboration was one of the best, most distinct in the business.  These compositions are amazing and this one looked so good, they made 70mm blow-ups of it.  Color is consistent, depth is good and detail is better than all previous versions of the film.

 

Those 70mm prints had 4.1 Dolby magnetic stereo mixes, while the 35mm prints offered Dolby advanced SR (Spectral Recording) analog system.  The film was issued in standard Dolby Digital 5.1 on DVD, plus a special DTS-only DVD that was good, if not great.  That same upgraded sound mix is here only in Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 and hold sup decently for its age, though not even the best sound mix from its time.  John Williams delivered one of his most ironic scores, which sounds very good here.

 

The only extras are an NBC News piece on the film and solid feature length audio commentary track by Stone.

 

When the film was released, there was this feeling that it captured the past so well with the hope that we would not make the same mistakes ever again, but we now know that mistakes have been repeated and on some ways on purpose as if that would make Vietnam Syndrome go away.  Instead, it compounded it and with silly controversies surrounding Cruise and even Stone, the film is not as remembered as it should be.  Now more important than ever, despite some limits and minor flaws (like the melodrama preventing it from going as far as it should have politically), Born On The Fourth Of July is an important testament to the true history of what happened then, what has happened now (even though the government literally has had the returning injured censored by a too-willing national media) and shows how great Stone was before he was eclipsed by Michael Moore as the director most able to take the hardest look at a U.S.A. that is and does not have to be.  This HD-DVD more than does justice to that vision.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo


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