SOURCE: Smith, Gavin. “Body Count.” Film Comment 25, no. 4 (July-August 1989): 49-52.

In the following mixed review of Casualties of War, Smith contends that “the film misses out on the opportunity to provoke ideologically.”

Brian De Palma and David Rabe's Casualties of War offers the familiar guilty pleasures of the Vietnam picture: the vicarious sensations of combat exhilaration and the relinquishment of moral, social and historical coordinates—as all hell breaks loose around you. But it also advances the evolution of the Vietnam genre, which has always sought to transcend the political disillusionment and absurdist nihilism upon which it was based, by entering the forbidden territory of American war atrocity, only until now glimpsed in Platoon and Apocalypse Now.

U.S. atrocity has been integral to people's perception of Vietnam and yet suppressed, unuttered. All agree Vietnam was a mistake; only some consider it criminal. Casualties of War inadvertently stumbles...