It is, to my recollection, the absolute worst, cheesiest, most preposterous Vietnam war movie ever made, but feel free to send in any titles you think rival the flick for that prize. In fact, the movie was so bad it was impossible to take seriously as an indictment of the Vietnam-era American military, but that didn't stop it from winning a Golden Globe way back when. Still, the story, if I remember correctly, pretty much mirrors that of De Palma's latest title, Redacted: American soldiers rape a young girl in between 'insane warfighting schedule' of murdering civilians.

At least in Casualties of War, the main character was troubled by what was transpiring and tried to save the abducted Vietnamese villager. In this movie, De Palma needn't portray any Americans in a positive light, since it's based on a true story--and we all know that in the real world there are no good American soldiers. Still, one might note that the four Americans who participated in the savagery depicted by De Palma in Redacted were all held to account and are currently serving lengthy prison sentences (in Casualties of War the military chain of command was portrayed as complicit in the crime and the cover-up).

Meanwhile, al Qaeda is busy chopping off peoples heads and killing women and children, but they make their own movies, so why bother depicting that on the big screen. And as De Palma says:

"The pictures are what will stop the war. One only hopes that these images will get the public incensed enough to motivate their Congressmen to vote against this war," he said.

It is surprising that Americans ever went to see another movie war again after this picture:

Update: Confederate Yankee weighs in:

It seems almost certain that if De Palma covered the battle for Okinawa in 1945, his predilection for vilifying the American military would no doubt have led him to tell the story of the noble schoolteacher who led her classroom of children over the cliffs to their deaths at Humeyuri-no-to, and the bloodthirsty Marines they escaped from into death.

Sounds about right.