Linbeymusol Wonderful character development!

Brennan Camacho Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Anoushka Slater While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Ella-May O'Brien Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

MisterChandu I really can't say how impressed I was with this film. The question here is who was directing who?This is a primary record of history as important as any other document on film I have ever scene.Diem being assassinated and Kennedy also soon after makes one wonder if maybe the stars were against us anyhow. I can remember the summer of 1963. All we were concerned about at the time was if we would beat the Russians to the moon. It was the better part of the cold war.Oh well.History can be so much rubbish except to those who will repeat it's mistakes.

sddavis63 In some ways a simple "talking head" documentary - a lot of it is Robert McNamara (U.S. Secretary of Defence in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and therefore during a good part of the Vietnam War) simply answering questions. It's also combined with some good archival footage of some of the significant events of his lifetime, however, and it isn't exactly what you might expect it to be.I expected it to be largely a justification of McNamara's policies and actions regarding Vietnam, but it's more than that. Essentially McNamara takes his many life experiences - not only as Defence Secretary, but as an army officer during World War II, a professor at Harvard, President of Ford Motor Company, and Head of the World Bank - and develops from them eleven life lessons that he shares. Vietnam is a part of that mix, of course, but isn't really dealt with at length until the last half hour or so of the documentary, and he neither justifies nor admits to guilt about anything - at least not about Vietnam. At the end of the story (in a portion subtitled "Epilogue") McNamara is essentially given the chance to offer judgment on his Vietnam policies but declines, saying simply that he knows things we don't know, and he'd prefer it to remain that way. Fair enough. My impression is that if he were to respond to the question of whether he felt any guilt, he'd say "no. I did what I thought was right at the time." The eleven life lessons are largely common sense ones, and I don't think it's necessary to list them. The film can be watched to find out about them. One that did strike me, though, was "in order to do good, sometimes you have to engage in evil." This, of course, runs counter to the thought which is probably pre-eminent in society that "two wrongs don't make a right," and instead promotes "the ends justify the means" thinking. A couple of other statements McNamara made that stuck with me were his honest admission that, if Japan had won World War II, he and Curtis LeMay would probably have been tried as war criminals for planning the fire bombing of Japanese cities (actually, he goes so far as to say that they were war criminals) and his belief that had Kennedy not been assassinated, the United States wouldn't have become as deeply involved in Vietnam as it did under Johnson.It's an interesting documentary which offers a personal look at McNamara and his thoughts rather than just an assessment of his role in Vietnam. Well worth watching. 7/10

Brigid O Sullivan (wisewebwoman) I saw this first in the theatres and meant to review it at the time but never did. I got another chance to see it the other night and was blown away again by the approach the film-maker, Errol Morris, takes in the making of this.They say that a life unexamined is not worth living and the subject of this documentary, Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson, examines his life and his decisions under the unrelenting eye of the camera and admits to failures and misinterpreted intelligence and tells us what he could have done better and what we all should do when confronted with similar scenarios in the light of the history of both the Second World War and Vietnam.I had never known the extent of the firebombing of all the wooden cities of Japan - and this was before the nuclear devastation that was to befall them. Horrific. Innocent civilians, uncountable children, swept away in fear and pain.I had also never known how the perception of Vietnam by the U.S. was so very, very wrong. The motivations projected onto Vietnam by the U.S. were completely incorrect.Robert McNamara shines a new light on all of this with the benefit of hindsight and new intelligence and weeps with the rest of us. I could not help thinking of how one could live with the blood of so, so many on one's hands. How does one achieve peace?The eleven lessons, though trite at times, have never been brought to bear on the current conflict. But should be.9 out of 10. It should be shown in every school in the world.

Don Muvo I'm deeply sorry I had to betray my prejudices in my summary. I loved this movie, both because it helped me understand 20th century American History better, but also because it is the video memoir of one of the men who best characterized American military thinking at mid century. I summarize the movie this way because it should leave you with many questions.We were all very excited about John F. Kennedy back when the Vietnam war was still only a civil war, and not yet a war of America against the communist bloc. JFK was widely respected, both for the agility of his mind, and his ability to take advice from others, even those he was confronting as enemies. Unfortunately, as we all know, the JFK presidency ended suddenly and prematurely, and the Vietnam War was escalated by a very different type of man, Lyndon Baines Johnson. This is the story about the man who ran the war for him. It is not a story about the war, it is a story about the man, and because the man is a philosopher, in a way it is a story about all men. McNamara makes it very clear that he is not an elitist. The film depicts him as a person trying to do his job as he saw it, as efficiently and carefully as he could, and like many of us, a person who was sometimes afraid to admit mistakes.I hope you enjoy this film as much as I did.