The Vietnam War
Fifteen films, in the order the war happened.
15 entries · about 32h 41m across the 15 with a published runtime
American cinema spent thirty years processing this war and made some of its best films doing it. In release order that reads as a country arguing with itself. In the order the events happened, it reads as the war.
Fifteen films, and one absence large enough that it is named in full at the foot of this page rather than left for you to notice.
If you only watch 8
The Quiet American, We Were Soldiers, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, The Killing Fields. That is about 18h 12m. It covers the French beginning, the escalation, Tet, the ground war and what came home afterwards. Everything else on this list deepens one of those rather than adding another.
How this is ordered
Each film is filed at the point it enters the war, not where it opens. Born on the Fourth of July begins in 1956 with a boy at a parade, and is filed at the January 1968 firefight that paralyses him, because that is where it joins this list. The note on each entry says what it covers either side.
One consequence worth stating. The list opens in 1952, before any American combat troops, because the war the United States joined was already years old and had been French first. A Vietnam timeline that opens with helicopters opens halfway through.
- 011952Core ten
The Quiet American
2002 · 1h 41m · Saigon, French Indochina
Saigon before the Americans arrived in force, with a British journalist watching a young US aid worker take an interest in the country. The only entry that explains how the war began rather than what it felt like, and everything after it makes more sense for having seen it first.
- 021965
Good Morning, Vietnam
1987 · 2h 1m · Saigon, armed forces radio
The early escalation seen from inside the propaganda apparatus, an angle nothing else here takes. It is also the last entry on this list that is funny, and its position second is deliberate: the floor drops after this and never comes back up.
- 0314 November 1965Core ten
We Were Soldiers
2002 · 2h 18m · The Ia Drang valley
The first major engagement between American regulars and the North Vietnamese Army, filmed as a procedural. It is the one entry that gives the other side a command structure and a plan rather than treating them as ambush, which is a low bar that almost nothing else here clears.
- 04February 1966
Rescue Dawn
2006 · 2h 5m · Laos, a secret war
A pilot shot down over Laos during a campaign that officially was not happening. Here for the geography as much as the film: the war was never confined to Vietnam, and almost every other entry behaves as though it was.
- 05November 1966
Casualties of War
1989 · 1h 53m · Hill 192
Built on the abduction and murder of a Vietnamese woman by an American squad, and on the one soldier who reported it. The hardest entry here to sit through, and the closest this list comes to giving a Vietnamese character any interior life, which it manages by making her death the subject.
- 061967Core ten
Platoon
1986 · 2h 0m · The Cambodian border, US infantry
Written and directed by somebody who was there, which shows in the texture rather than the plot: the heat, the boredom, and the sorting of men into those you stay near and those you do not. The best single answer here to what a year-long tour was actually like.
- 0720 January 1968Core ten
Born on the Fourth of July
1989 · 2h 25m · Vietnam, then Long Island
Half a film about combat and half about what the country did with the men it sent back, and the second half is the one almost nothing else covers. Watch it beside Coming Home and the two make an argument neither makes alone.
Note. Opens in 1956 and runs to 1976. Filed at the firefight that paralyses Ron Kovic, which is where it joins the war.
- 08January 1968Core ten
Full Metal Jacket
1987 · 1h 56m · Parris Island, then Hue
Two films joined at the middle, and the join is the point: the first half manufactures the soldier and the second spends him. Tet is where the war stopped being winnable in American opinion, which is why it sits here rather than anywhere else.
Note. Opens with eight weeks of boot camp before it reaches Vietnam. Filed at the Tet Offensive, where the fighting starts.
- 091968
Coming Home
1978 · 2h 8m · California, the home front
Made while the wound was still open, and set entirely in America among the wives and the paralysed. The only entry with no combat in it at all, which is exactly why it belongs on a list that is otherwise men with rifles.
- 101969Core ten
Apocalypse Now
1979 · 2h 27m · Up the river, into Cambodia
The least literal film here and the one that has outlasted the rest. It is not reporting on the war so much as arguing that the war had no floor, and the further up the river it goes the less it pretends to be about Vietnam at all.
Note. The 147-minute cut, matching the entry on Coppola’s page. A 153-minute 35mm version, a 202-minute Redux and a 183-minute Final Cut all exist.
- 11May 1969
Hamburger Hill
1987 · 1h 50m · Hill 937, Dong Ap Bia
Eleven assaults on one ridge near the Laotian border, taken at enormous cost and abandoned within weeks. It is the entry that best conveys the strategic logic of the ground war, which is that there frequently was not one.
- 12June 1971
The Post
2017 · 1h 56m · Washington, the Pentagon Papers
The moment the official account of the war collided with the classified one, in a newsroom rather than a jungle. Placed here because by 1971 the argument had moved home, and the rest of this list is about men who never got to have it.
- 13Early 1970s to 1975Core ten
The Deer Hunter
1978 · 3h 4m · Pennsylvania and Saigon
Three friends from a steel town, before, during and long after. The longest entry, and the one that treats the war as something that happens to a place rather than to soldiers. The hour before anybody leaves for Vietnam is doing the real work.
Note. The film never dates itself precisely. It runs from a steel-town wedding to shortly before the fall of Saigon in 1975, and is filed in the middle of that.
- 141973 to 1979Core ten
The Killing Fields
1984 · 2h 21m · Cambodia, a Cambodian journalist
What the war did next door, carried largely by Dith Pran rather than the American reporter beside him, which makes it the closest this list gets to a Southeast Asian protagonist. The killing it covers outlasted the American withdrawal and exceeded it in scale.
- 15Present day
Da 5 Bloods
2020 · 2h 36m · Ho Chi Minh City, veterans returning
Four Black veterans go back, which lets the film ask something the rest of this list never raises: what the men sent to fight it were owed at home while they fought. The right place to stop, because it is the only entry looking back at the war rather than standing inside it.
Note. Present day, cut with 1960s flashbacks played by the same actors at their current ages, deliberately and without de-ageing.
What is missing, and why
There is no major Western film told from the Vietnamese side. Fifteen entries above, around thirty-three hours, and the people whose country it was appear almost entirely as scenery, threat or victim. Not one of these films has a Vietnamese protagonist. That is the defining absence of the whole genre, and curating this list harder does not fix it: Vietnamese cinema made those films and Western distribution never carried them.
The air war. More tonnage fell here than in all of the Second World War, and it is close to absent from cinema. What exists is helicopters at treetop height, because that is what a camera can follow.
Laos and Cambodia. The bombing of both was secret at the time and is barely filmed now. Rescue Dawn reaches Laos and The Killing Fields reaches what came after in Cambodia, and between them they cover a fraction of it.
The French war, 1946 to 1954. The Quiet American sits inside it, and no accessible Western film covers Dien Bien Phu, which is where the thing was decided.
The refugees. More than a million people left by sea after 1975, and there is no canonical film about it.
If you know one that closes any of these, the correction address is on the contact page.
Corrections and additions go to watchinorder.in@gmail.com.