Theo Robertson It's interesting that when this film was released in 1993 that the prominent scene shown in film review shows is the scene where the South Vietnamese Army enter the village of Le Ly and come under attack by the VC . This gives the impression you're going to be watching a Vietnam film and the early part of the film does concentrate on the history of Vietnam . Too much so because if you do have a rough outline of Vietnamese history then you'll find the main story is being held up by Le Ly's potted history of Vietnam at every opportunity . There is a train of thought that if a film is too reliant on voice over then the film is failing on that level and this may well be a case in point That's not the only flaw . The way everything is shot gives an idealised view of a far off exotic land . If the Vietnamese government want to do a plug for visiting Vietnam then director Oliver Stone has done the country a big favour . There's a war on don't you and no matter what Le Ly's village still manages to look like a Utopian destination and despite people getting frequently killed and raped one wonders why on Earth anyone would want to leave here . Indeed the cynic in me wonders if Stone is seeking a personal redemption by making this film . I know Stone volunteered for military service in Vietnam and I know prior to that he volunteered to be an English language teacher in Vietnam but yet I never felt I was watching a real world view of Vietnam , more of a clichéd Lonely Planet romanticised Westerner view of the country There's also another flaw and that is Stone seems obsessed with Eastern mysticism . Heaven and Earth ? Ying and Yang ? Slumdog non millionaire and other new age nonsense as Stone concentrates on Karma and other metaphysical nonsense . The Vietnam war came about via Cold War politics and had nothing to do with nature or anything else outside of human engineered power struggles . Stone wants us to believe that a spiritual force is controlling everything but I'm afraid I'm more likely to listen to historians and scientists rather than soothsayers . The main flaw of the movie is that the story is ugly but the visuals are beautiful and while the audience can understand the point Stone is making via this technique it doesn't make new age thinking anymore credible

ebiros2 To me, this and JFK are the best movies from director Oliver Stone, but the two are world apart as far as the movie goes.First the backdrop of each scene of this movie makes you yearn for somewhere to go home to. Then you see the tanks, the soldiers, and of course the war shows that home is being ravaged into a place where you can't go any more. I actually feel being torn away from the place of my heart, and I'm not even Vietnamese. So I'd say the visual impact of this movie is high.South Viet Nam was a relatively wealthy country in Southeast Asia because they had the perfect climate for growing rice and crops, but just because of the war, you see people becoming destitute. The way the story and the visuals comes together in this movie is one of the best I've seen. It really provokes something in the heart. I've never had a movie experience like this before or since I've seen this movie. The only negative I can see is the poor quality of Asian female actors. Except for Hiep who played the lead role, everyone else was bad to the point of being painful to watch.If a movie is supposed to tell the story and give the simulated experience of the people who are in the story, this is without a doubt one of the best movie I've ever seen.

jzappa Stone looks objectively at the spiritual way of life led by a Vietnamese village, how they mind immaterial happiness to be able to survive the misery of their corporeal lives. The film begins as an exposition of the village, then begins to focus on one of its resident families, and all the while slowly tightens more and more into a study of one of the daughters, an impassioned girl named Le Ly, whose view of life is not much different than that of the rest of her family but embodies the journey that affirms the importance of their spiritual experience. She is born into a babe-in-the-woods atmosphere, in which her village lives as they have for centuries. All is in its place like the ancestors who are buried on land that has been in the same family for so long. Then a warplane screams across the sky, and in a heartbeat all she knows is sieged. What she believes to be her fate will take her from the rice patties of the Central Highlands to the sprawling bubble of California.Oliver Stone has made films about Vietnam from the point of view of a combat infantryman and a paralyzed veteran, and now in this unsung gem he punctuates an indispensable installment into a trilogy by seeing the war through the eyes of a Vietnamese woman. The story is true, as were Platoon, drawn from his own first-hand experience, and Born on the Fourth of July, based on the autobiography of Ron Kovic.I feel safe in saying that the seminal spirituality of this film is objective, and vitally so, because there are many things about this film that seem externally uncharacteristic of Stone's body of work. For instance, he is not known for films about women. This is the first time he has had to place himself inside a woman's thoughts, and that he indiscriminately does owes no small piece to Hiep Thi Le's performance in the leading role. Having been born in Vietnam, come to America as a child, knowing both worlds, is perfectly cast for such a culturally and realistically complicated character to portray. Seeing the war through her eyes, watching as foreign troops beeline across the fields of her family, we are asked by Stone to see how radically antagonistic the American strategy in Vietnam was. The long-term aim was to win the "hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese people. With this intent, we displaced them from the land of their ancestors, and shepherded them into "strategic hamlets" made to force the Viet Cong out, even if they worked more like camps to keep the residents in. This strife indeed emboldened them to relate to the Cong, who appreciated their same ideals.For common growers who wanted just to farm, the war brought nightmarish dilemmas. Into her life one day comes a towering, rugged American named Steve Butler, in one of Tommy Lee Jones's becoming, persuasive and mood-swinging performances, who does not want her as a hooker, but as a wife. He is kind, compassionate, determined, yet maybe if she were less hard up she would discern a worrying connotation when he claims, "I want an Oriental wife." His image of her is desperately entwined with his own internal debilitations, his need for a woman who will concurrently absolve him, and submit to him.Le Ly returns to America as Mrs. Steve Butler, to a land where the supermarket shelves seem to sprawl infinitely in all vectors and the in-laws treat her as something between a darling and an embarrassment. One of her American relatives is played, through skillful casting, by Debbie Reynolds. Le Ly has issues adapting, but not as many as her husband, who learns that his groundwork and 20 years as a "military adviser" have left him despairingly unfit for civilian life. Jones shows his talent for characters who are never scarier than when they are simpatico.The anamorphic cinematography by the great Robert Richardson dials up the color palette so that the transition from the horrific chaos in Vietnam and the commodified epic pleasantry of America is almost explosively surreal. We follow Le Ly and her new husband into supermarkets and split-level San Diego kitchens with relentless wide angle lenses and sometimes even the out-of-sync slow motion Stone would soon fall in love with while making Natural Born Killers.Part of what made Stone such a draw in the earlier half of his career and a deterrent in his latter half is that he treasures politically controversial topics. When the Vietnam War was the most vital in contemporary American history, just Stone made it his work as a filmmaker. Movies are a very different course to make a meaningful assertion than one which can be accompanied by explanatory notes. Movies interface in the ways things show, sense, sound. In Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July and now Heaven and Earth, Stone has us see through eyes that saw three bases of that atrocity.

mujipor silly questionbut is it a true account? and anyone know if it is based on a book? i saw this movie many years ago, it made me cry...definitely worth watching anyone know any more Vietnam war type movies based on the people in Vietnam during the war? i remember the story when she moved to the USA with tommy lee..it was really good to see her adapt to life there. And tommy lee did an excellent job, sad ending though..which i will not expose.okay a newbie to IMDb and its not letting me submit this because it has to be ten lines of text so i am just blabbering on and on because i really cant remember the details of the film, apart from the fact that it was strikingly powerful and very moving and very good..okay more than ten lines now