Vietnam in HD Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.5

Vietnam in HD Blu-ray Movie Review

A silent minority finds it voice.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman November 29, 2011

Vietnam was the first war that was a regular part of the evening news, and that fact fundamentally changed the way the war was fought as well as the perception of the conflict both at home and abroad. When Lyndon Johnson famously admitted that if he had “lost” Walter Cronkite, he had lost the American people, and therefore was incapable of winning another term as President, it was in its own way as potent a commentary on the power of the tube as anything else that was broadcast during the turbulent decade of the sixties. But Vietnam was a “different” kind of war from the very beginning, as Vietnam in HD makes abundantly clear. While the United States has been involved in all sorts of questionable brouhahas throughout its history (the Spanish-American War, anyone?), but none was as outright peculiar as the Vietnam “War,” a conflict that actually wasn’t a “real” war, at least in the beginning. Though Vietnam in HD largely skips over the “pre-history” of Vietnam in its nascent form as Indo-China, and the various international influences there, notably the French, the documentary still makes it clear that in the early days of the American involvement, which this piece perhaps inaccurately casts as circa 1964, the United States probably ingenuously considered itself an “advisor,” not a combatant. It was a convenient turn of events when the Vietcong attacked an American ship in the Gulf of Tonkin, almost immediately spurring the United States Congress into giving President Johnson more or less absolute war powers, despite the fact that war had not been declared. But the United States found itself oddly in the same predicament that the British had when they had fought the incipient Colonists in the American war for independence. Now the boots were on the other foot, for it was the Americans who couldn’t quite figure out how to deal with guerrilla tactics, much as the British had been similarly confounded centuries earlier. There was nothing about this conflict, in other words, that played by the old, established rules.

Vietnam in HD takes a page from the book of its parent documentary, WWII in HD, and offers a wealth of first person reminiscences about not just the conflict itself, but perhaps just as importantly, the overall feeling of that era. What makes this documentary spectacularly successful at times is its artful melding of voice actors narrating remembrances which suddenly segue into actual interview segments with each particular individual. This technique helps to span the various time periods and gives Vietnam in HD a visceral aspect that helps bring the memories totally alive. What’s so bracing about this is the clear evolution (if that’s the right word) of feelings about Vietnam, from a sort of nonchalant sanguinity circa 1964, when a young man is almost excited about going to fight, albeit in a place where he’s not really sure what’s going on or why he’s needed, to just a year or so later, when discontent over the “progress” of the war and the increasing demands of the draft had turned virtually an entire generation against their own government and its policies of supposedly containing Communism.

Perhaps even more than in WWII in HD, Vietnam in HD deals with the stateside reaction to the war, especially as the conflict drags on into what has been termed as a quagmire, or, in Cronkite’s famous verbiage, a “stalemate.” In fact it’s in this “middle” period, circa 1965-69, that Vietnam in HD is often at its most riveting, as the roiling counterculture movement in the United States began to completely alter the public’s perception of what was going on. There may indeed have been a Silent Majority, to quote the famous Richard Nixon coinage, but that older generation wasn’t immune to what was going on with their own kids and neighbors’ offspring, and while there was a generation gap, there’s little doubt that disenchantment with Vietnam grew by leaps and bounds during this period, ultimately bringing down the Johnson presidency.

The documentary tends to deal in epochal events as seen through the eyes of various individuals, and while that gives an up close and personal feel to the piece, it also tends to keep the documentary from going into much detail in terms of the larger forces at work. We are given such generalist salient points as the fact that even though the North Vietnamese may have lost over ten times what the Americans did in casualties, they were willing to “replace” their losses with every last available citizen, while the dissipating tolerance and political will in America made that less and less palatable. But on the other hand whole months of the conflict, including some major events, are simply glossed over, perhaps because no eyewitness testimony was available to anchor those segments.

There’s a great deal about Vietnam in HD which many viewers may find shocking, even downright disturbing, not the least of which was the American policy of “Search and Destroy,” the only strategy the commanders seemed to be able to come up with that could even partially address the guerrilla tactics of the Vietcong. What that meant of course was the wholesale slaughter of people, including a lot of civilian casualties. It may be at least partially understandable when one begins to realize that many of the guerrilla fighters would simply blend back into their respective villages once any given attack had been promulgated, but it still lends a lot of this documentary a kind of unseemliness that sullies American’s self-image that we’re always the honorable fighters doing the right thing.

In fact it’s that very dialectic which seems to color a lot of the vets’ memories and feelings about what they did. Several of the guys utilized in the documentary are clearly conflicted about their time in Vietnam. On one hand, they’re justifiably proud of having served, even if the “cause” itself has been questioned (even by them). On the other hand, they were greeted as pariahs by and large when they returned home, and many of them, while proud, are also discouraged and regretful. It’s perhaps Vietnam in HD’s greatest attribute that it finally gives this silent minority—the soldiers who actually fought there and lived to tell about it—a voice.

Vietnam in HD Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Vietnam in HD is presented courtesy of A+E Networks Home Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p presentation in 1.78:1. In the early days of Blu-ray and HD in general, I used to regularly take The History Channel's home video releases to task for not being anamorphically enhanced. Unfortunately, History is making an equal but opposite (perhaps even worse) mistake, one they also made on the recently released Collector's Edition of WWII in HD. Now instead of not anamorphically enhancing 16x9 source elements, they are routinely stretching 4x3 elements to fit a 16x9 frame. The days of consumer ignorance about such matters are largely past, and it's inexcusable to see these bizarrely wide soldiers moving through the frame. What's even odder is that evidently other elements were properly matted and kept in a proper aspect ratio but displayed at 1.78:1. Why that attempt was made on only some of the footage is peculiar, to say the least. The contemporary interview segments are of course properly framed and anamorphically enhanced. In terms of actual video quality, as with any compilation of this type, source elements are highly variable and are culled from every small millimeter format imaginable, including home movies (8mm), so results vary greatly in quality. Some of this footage looks surprisingly spry, with decent color and detail, while other material is little more than a blur.

Vietnam in HD Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

As with WWII in HD, a lot of the footage utilized in Vietnam in HD was originally silent, so the lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix is the result of careful planning by a usually artful team of sound and mixing wizards. Generally the soundtrack very nicely matches the action, with well placed explosions, calls from the troops, and the general mayhem of battle filling the surrounds. The soundtrack has ample LFE in the gunfire and explosion footage, as might be imagined, and has some surprising dynamic range as it moves through contemporary interview segments, voice over work by a coterie of actors, and the narration by Michael C. Hall. Fidelity is top notch throughout the track, though there are some kind of peculiar general volume discrepancies in the final episode, where amplitude is noticeably softer part way through the episode.

Vietnam in HD Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

No supplements are included on either of the two Blu-ray discs in this collection.

Vietnam in HD Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Vietnam in HD as history is exceptional, when taken within the context of this recreating various individuals' experiences, rather than trying to give a generalist overview of what happened. Some may notice a couple of lurches through time, where whole swaths of events aren't even mentioned, but overall this documentary is compelling and disturbing in equal measure. The anamorphic stretching of 1.33:1 material to fit a 1.78:1 frame is disappointing and ruins a lot of the archival footage, but otherwise this is a great release from The History Channel. Recommended.