84C MoPic (1989)

Simply Perfect

People are voting emotionally.

How sad is this?

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

84C 'MoPic' is a military cameraman filming a Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol (LRRP) mission during the Vietnam War. LT is a lieutenant new in country and eager to climb the military ladder. OD (Richard Brooks) is a wise sergeant. Easy is short. With Pretty Boy, Hammer and Cracker, the group encounters the enemy and dangers along the way.This is what is today referred to as found footage movie. The movie is filmed through MoPic's camera point of view. What I love the most are the little insightful moments of the cat and mouse game with the North Vietnamese. Some of the 'talk' with the group gets a bit too written. Asking Cracker about his black leader is too on-the-nose. The low budget doesn't interfere too much. It forces the movie to focus on the small group. The action isn't as compelling as one would expect because it does get confused. In a way, it's more realistic but less cinematic. This is a fascinating experiment in filmmaking.

This is a curious mixture of good and bad . By 1989 the Vietnam war film had been blazing across cinema screens for over ten years and audiences were growing of tired of this genre in much the same way as America became literally tired of the ongoing conflict in South East Asia 20 years earlier . We'd already had the home front movie with THE DEER HUNTER and COMING HOME , war as expressionist horror film in APOCALYPSE NOW and black comedy in FULL METAL JACKET and GO TELL THE SPARTANS . You can see writer/director Patrick Sheane Duncan trying to do a grunts eye view of the conflict but is limited by budget so tries a new twist on this by having the entire action filmed as stock war footage What Duncan does manage to do is convey the absurdity of tours of duty . In the Vietnam era American individual soldiers would complete a tour of duty then would be replaced by another individual soldier . What this meant that American units would be entirely composed of soldiers would have differing tour lengths with some men almost completing their tour while their colleagues had several hundred days till the " wake up " which meant a complete lack of unit cohesion with the veterans in the unit having undisguised contempt for the newbies which they'd describe as FNGs' . The film illustrates this very well with the de facto platoon leader OD having little respect for the new LT and the camera team What the film doesn't do very well is giving a sense of time and place . Again the budget is the problem and at no time did I get the impression I was watching something take place in Vietnam in 1969 . Some people have argued that WE WERE SOLDIERS and THE GREEN BERETS were also set in the central highlands and wouldn't feature the dense humid jungles that's perceived as being a geographical feature of South East Asia but even so you're conscious that it probably wasn't filmed too far from the Burbank Studios in California and despite the use of strong language it has a look and feel of a TVM and for a film purporting to be true to life film footage it's not nearly stylised enough and it's difficult to believe this film influenced the likes of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT , CLOVERFIELD and other lost footage film

Watching 84 Charlie MoPic right after watching Rambo: First Blood Part II is like watching a difference between a Republican and a Democrat. You get to see all of the mindless, brawny stuff, the nonsense and the mayhem, and in the end everything is supposed to turn out alright when it really shouldn't. Then you get to see some sensibility, compassion, understanding, and there's still a tough quality when it's there and not hidden behind the speeches. It's a fascinating experiment to do if you're into movies in general, or have seen neither one particularly. Ultimately, MoPic won the double feature in terms of quality and durability, albeit with a smaller budget and sometimes a little *too* much on its mind. Neither film reinvents the wheel (and naturally Rambo blew maybe too many up to count), but with Patrick Duncan's film he gets to the heart and soul of what is best about these guys in combat: soldiers just making their way, some harder asses than others, who all just want to find a way home. Sadly, Rambo's home *is* the jungle, but that's for another review.One can tell the film is low-budget, if nothing else, because of the lack of action. It's possible that the director might have been tempted to up the ante if he had more to work with, or bigger-name stars. But as with other under-the-radar "B movies" about war, less can be more depending on the script and the actors given. No one is really too recognizable here (some actors went on to do TV, others didn't, they were all fresh faces to me), and that adds to the believability. No one is an action hero, and some are just scared so much you can feel it through clenched teeth. There's jokes told here and there, some big words, and steely glances. No one in this company going through Charlie's territory likes it one iota, not even LT, who is looking perhaps to rise in the ranks of what he sees as a "corporation" like Gulf & Western. Another soldier rightfully quips, 'or Engulf and Devour.'The approach that writer/director/former-vet Duncan does is not the first of its kind in terms of style (he was preceded by at least a few years by Cannibal Holocaust's method of first-person cinematography and point of view), but it's the first film I can think of that uses not only the approach but the person holding the camera as part of the story. MioPic is a guy who has been editing footage for a while at a nearby base, and gets cans and cans of films to look at; some have nothing, other ones, well, they keep him up at night. That this isn't just a passive observer adds to the tension when it comes time to shoot the combat footage (however little it is, though it makes sense after a while), since he's got to have the balls to keep up and not look away. It covers the problem that certain horror films have when one wonders why the camera wouldn't just turn off after a while. We are, as they are, stuck in a fixed position. Oddly enough it kind of is the predecessor of the real-life approach to filming most of the documentary Restrepo. Again, for another review on that one.While one could nitpick certain things with the style- such as, there being perfect sound but it being a camera circa 1968 or 1969, which means a sound guy or at least a boom operator would need to be around, and who isn't- but it's really about the men on screen, men that Duncan himself may have known to an extent. It should be noted that not all of the characters are originals either. There's the cocky guy, the quiet focused man (no interviews), the country white-trash guy (actually, he's not as conventional as you'd expect), and a few other types. The approach in how long we stick with the guys, just them talking, before a shot is even fired, does do something crucial: we are with them for so long that they become real and we can feel the pain when one is hurt, or , eventually, as they're picked off. Some of this is so powerful that one can overlook certain similarities to other war films (i.e. the 'sniper-shooting-soldier' scene in Full Metal Jacket, a heated exchange of one soldier to another from Platoon).It's a character piece that gets us feeling for what these soldiers had to go through, how insane it was just to get from point A to B to C, how its 'corporation' of sorts was neither a real business or a game, perhaps something in between. It's far from perfect, but it's alive and kicking as a testament to people in war. It never trivializes, or makes it very "fun", but it's hard to look away. Unlike Rambo (which I did not hate by the way), it's as true as it can be.

As a former LRRP myself (LRSU it is now called) I was ecstatic to find this movie when it first came out as it wasn't highly budgeted nor widely released. The movie hits very authentic notes about LRRP teams except for the fact that they talk a heck of a lot more than any real LRRP team would in the filed (but then again, you wouldn't have much of a movie if they didn't talk). the attention to detail is very good, from calling in arty missions on a discovered enemy base camp to doing the damage assessment after it. The morale and esprit do corps of recon teams is shown very well here. If you are interested at all in small unit missions, this is at the top of the short list!