From: Thomas Barclay <Thomas.Barclay@s...>
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2000 11:06:42 -0500
Subject: Programs/Movies
This is a (somewhat) interesting thread. The History Channel is running Tour of Duty in the evenings. Although it presents a somewhat cleaned-up view of Vietnam, it is kind of engaging. The characters seem interesting, and at least some of the fight sequences are realistic. I saw one last night where the platoon was deployed split between two locations 12 km apart, and one half was being overrun. They ran short on ammo and had to let the enemy get amidst their positions in order to get weapons/ammo. It also showed underage soldiers, a not uncommon thing in any war(my own Grandfather enlisted when he was 16 to fight in WWI by lying about his age). Someone said they hadn't seen Sharpe's Waterloo. It was pretty good. The fighting around Quatre-Bras at the farmhouse was interestingly done. As was (I think) the deployment of (I hope I get this right) a British unit on the fore part of a hill (allowing the French Great Battery to maul it). But it tracked Sharpe's progress through the battle. You see a few beloved characters die fighting. It wasn't too badly done at all (but then, I'm not wise in the ways of Waterloo...). It would be interesting to see a film made (like Aliens) that was just a "war movie" set in a sci-fi background - one that didn't focus on the gee-whiz gizmos or the Force. Just a movie that focused on the "eternal" facts of combat - the men, their lives, and maybe some of the battles they fought. It'd be expensive to do right. But one can only watch so many Star Trek battles (give me a single M-16A2 and a few mags and I'd clear the bridge of any starship against those phaser toting clowns...) before becoming kind of disheartened with sci-fi ground/boarding combat. B5 was better, but still ended up being less than perfect. Their redemption lay in the addition of the phrase "Narn Bat Squad" to our collective vocabulary. And if Jon ever manages to convince a major Hollywood studio to make a film about the GZGverse, I'm sure he'd have plenty of technical advisors... ;)