The Vietnam War
2017
Original language: English
- documentary
- war & politics
The story
An immersive 360-degree narrative telling the epic story of the Vietnam War as it has never before been told on film. Featuring testimony from nearly 80 witnesses, including many Americans who fought in the war and others who opposed it, as well as Vietnamese combatants and civilians from both the winning and losing sides.
What it’s like
Measured archival footage dominates: grainy newsreel, faded Super 8 home movies, and stark military photographs, often held on a single frame while a voice speaks over it. Interviews with veterans, antiwar activists and Vietnamese survivors are shot in dim, even-lit rooms with a soft amber cast, the subjects centred and still, so attention settles on faces and hands. Peter Coyote's narration arrives in a low, unhurried register, sitting alongside a mournful, sparse score of strings and slow piano that rises and falls without swelling. The palette is muted and sepia-tinted, with jungle greens and rice-paddy browns giving way to the cold blue-grey of Washington offices. Pacing is patient and cumulative, in episodes that run long and circle back through the same years from different angles. The emotional register is grief-heavy and reflective, with a steady undertow of anger and regret, and the arcs follow ordinary people trying to make sense of what they lived through. Violence is frequent and real, shown through combat and bomb-damage footage and spoken accounts of killing, but rarely gratuitous; it lands as sorrowful and sobering, not thrilling. Best suited to viewers who want a deliberate, weighty history for an evening of sustained attention, not background watching.
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