Titreenp SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

FrogGlace In other words,this film is a surreal ride.

Ortiz Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Winifred The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

aurelien-francois-dory The film unforgettable opening which switches back and forth between scenes of a concert at the Hanoi Opera and a platoon's last stand against the Vietminh in the dead of the night, set the tone for the rest of the movie. This is a slow pace melancolic and factual depiction of the fall of the colonial presence in Indochine in the early 50's. Whilst adopting the perpective of french soldiers, the movie never falls into the trap of naive patriotism. Instead, it serves as a tribute to the lost lives of french soldiers, many of which came from the colonies. The soundtrack is composed by Georges Delerue, one of the most famous film composer of this era. He notably composed the score for 'Le Mépris' and in many ways the movie slow and tragic unfolding reminded me of 'Le Mépris' by JL Godard (1963). This is not a film I would recommend to everyone. It is a rare account of a military disaster and of the fall of the french colonial empire: a melancolic movie teinted by regrets. Visually, the movie is splendid, it shows hypnotic battle scenes, sometimes taking place in complete silence like shadow play on the theatre of a hill, only sparsely lit by bright explosions of mortar. The violence is suggested rather than explicitly shown. The movie makes use of beautiful long shot in order to show the breathtaking scenery where the troops await their fate. In that regard the story succeeds in delivering a looming sense of doom as the viewer is increasingly aware that Dien Bien Phu is forming into a deadly trap for the numerous french troups which have become isolated from the world. There are romantic undertones in the showing of men lost in monumental natural setting against which they are powerless, the theatre of french colonisation being swept away by the monsoon, and the Vietminh represented as a swift army of shadows. The movie has flaws, the length is one of them. Another possible issue people may have with it, is the tone which is difficult to pin down: at times the movie feels like a documentary and at times, an introspective epic. Overall, it is better to have some background on french cinema and the Indochine conflict before diving into this one. French films often refuse to deliver a clear message at the end of the movie. This is also the case of this movie and you won't find an obvious moral message here. Instead, the movie is about nuance and seems to pride itself in silence and its ghostly atmosphere. If you liked the movie you would probably also enjoy another of Schoendoerffer's work 'Le crabe Tambour' (1976). If you are rebutted by the weight of an epic war drama, I would recommend watching Verneuil's 'Un singe en Hiver' (1962) which captures the spirit of that era in a completely different setting and more lighthearted mood.

r-c-s Well, this movie is basically a fictionalized documentary about the fall of Dien Bien Phu. It goes 5/10 because photography is good enough and i could watch it until the end. There is nothing particular to say about acting. There are a few subplots, but they all boil down to how war affects people. Character development (if any) isn't noticeable. There is Donald Pleasence, but i wonder why...perhaps they needed some name-recognition tied to an obscure french movie. He plays a famed reported, but basically goes around exchanging futile chatter and riddles with basically sketched characters. It goes past 2h, so the movie drags its feet, for the kind of movie it is. I found it easily watchable enough, but i am NOT going to watch this twice. Good residual documentary value.

nuechti The movie is a good war movie. What is a good war movie? No heroes, no suicide attacks, no nonsense behaviour. It is quite a while since I've seen it, but I still remember having been touched deeply by the feeling the movie left after having watched it...any movie accomplishing that is worth to be seen.

Gilles Tran The French have done few films about their own Vietnam war. Schoendorffer has done two of them, the 317th Platoon and Dien Bien Phu, the latter about the 1954 battle where the French army was defeated and lost the war. This movie was a sort of answer to Oliver Stone's Platoon and its hand-held cinematography and "realistic" shooting et setting strongly evokes the recent US war movies. However it goes little beyond that (war is dirty, people did their best etc.). It may serves as a useful reminder of this war (it is quite forgotten, even in France) and as a touching tribute to the people who fought this doomed and dubious battle. It's more an interesting attempt than a real success as a movie.