Even though the low budget of this film shows through at times, it still manages to be a compelling and intense portrayal of the whole experience of being sent to Vietnam, right from boot camp up to fighting. It really feels like one is there is at times, and it is fascinating to watch the changes that characters undergo in the course of the film. The symbolic soccer themes and ideas do not always work, but they still retain some power. The camera-work and editing suits the project fine, and the film also has an excellent, haunting song, "Here I Am", to go with the material. It is quite similar in many ways to 'Full Metal Jacket', and even though the technical side and acting might be inferior here, this is still one hell of a fine movie depicting the experiences of being involved in war from a recruit's point of view.

1967. A group of new recruits arrive at a US Marine base for training. They're from all over the US and all walks of life and will need to work together to survive in combat. After training they're sent to Vietnam where the thing that is most likely to get them killed isn't the enemy but the agendas and incompetence of their officers.

I had high hopes for this film. From the plot summary and the first few scenes it reminded me of Full Metal Jacket, Stanley Kubrick's 1987 masterpiece. The cast even includes R. Lee Ermey as a drill instructor, a role he reprised in Full Metal Jacket.

However, this film pretty quickly shows that it is not in Full Metal Jacket's league. The plot is disjointed, clumsy and unfocused, we don't really sense the recruits struggles through training and there's not much character engagement.

Once the setting switched to Vietnam I figured things would go up a gear but then it appears the film is intended to be a satirical comedy! It is clear that the aim is to make fun of some the command decisions in Vietnam and the insanity of war. This is fine but here it is done in such a haphazard, unstructured way that the jokes often fall flat. Hard to have a punchline when there's no build-up to it!

The other problem is that writer-director Sidney J Furie is trying to have a bet each way, mixing drama and comedy. You'll have the sombreness of body bags and mournful music mixed in with inane comedic scenes. The tone is all over the place. MASH, both the movie and the series, managed to mix comedy with tragedy through knowing when to be serious and when to be funny and how to seamlessly blend the two. Sidney J Furie does not have that knack.

It's not all bad though. There are some decent dramatic scenes and some of the satire does hit its mark. This makes it all the more disappointing as you sense that if Furie and co-writer Rick Natkin had set out to make a film that was just a comedy or, especially, just a drama it could have worked quite well. Instead we have a film that is neither fish nor fowl.

The real life character played by Andrew Stevens kept a journal of his experiences as a recruit and then a soldier in Vietnam, and it became a major motion picture that is known as the first post-vietnam war movie. "Coming Home" and "The Deer Hunter" came out later that year and dealt with different teams, and "Apocalypse Now" dealt with a very complicated mission while "Hair" dealt mainly with war protest. It would take nearly a decade for films like "Full Metal Jacket" and "Platoon" for Vietnam to really return to the big screen so this personal drama filled with lots of action is really true view of what it was like to be involved in this war that people still talk about with hatred.

This isn't just a story of War. It is a story of racism in war, dealing with resentments of some of the recruits towards black soldier Stan Shaw and the resentment he gives them right back. Drill sergeant Lee Emery has no choice but to turn company see into fighting soldiers, and there's no room for hatred even with the prejudices. They must be there for each other or risk death, mutilation and psychological damage that there is no cure for. So while Shaw reacts with anger towards the treatment he gets, he takes his duties seriously, and that means doing what he can to make sure other American soldiers around him stay out of the line of fire no matter what their feelings towards him are or vice versa. They are cursing at each other one moment and diving over each other in the next to save them from an explosion. It's complex, disturbing and timeless.

War has always been brutal no matter what era it is such an, and this film doesn't hide their brutality. Once they are in Vietnam, there are differences in opinion over the belief in the right to kill, and a young Vietnamese boy who is revealed to like baseball becomes the example how far to the soldiers will go in their efforts to win the war and take down who they believe is the enemy with or without evidence. I recall scenes in "Full Metal Jacket" and "Platoom" that showed the reprehensible treatment of innocent countryfolk caught in the crossfire, one particular where a young Vietnamese man was brutally beaten to death, and while the film here is not as disturbing as that scene, it will remain in the back of my mind as I watched this.

This a very important film in many ways, and Shaw and Emery give very powerful performances. Shaw is very impressive, creating bonds with a few of the white soldiers, but unable to hide his feelings of resentment towards most of the others. When he comes across a soldier who has taken a drug overdose, he shows a Humanity that he's been forced to hide because he can't bear to watch someone die of something beyond their control but he knows it could have been prevented. You get to see the humanity in a good number of these characters in spite of their hatreds and prejudices, and it's the script of the film and the direction in addition to a fantastic mnsemble that makes this a must-see classic. While there is a slight anti-war message, it is very subtle, giving the audience the chance to form their own opinion towards the young men forced towards a hideousness that no innocent person should ever be forced to witness.