Heaven & Earth (1993)

You won't be disappointed!

Absolutely Fantastic

it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

To me, this and JFK are the best movies from director Oliver Stone, but the two are world apart as far as the movie goes.First the backdrop of each scene of this movie makes you yearn for somewhere to go home to. Then you see the tanks, the soldiers, and of course the war shows that home is being ravaged into a place where you can't go any more. I actually feel being torn away from the place of my heart, and I'm not even Vietnamese. So I'd say the visual impact of this movie is high.South Viet Nam was a relatively wealthy country in Southeast Asia because they had the perfect climate for growing rice and crops, but just because of the war, you see people becoming destitute. The way the story and the visuals comes together in this movie is one of the best I've seen. It really provokes something in the heart. I've never had a movie experience like this before or since I've seen this movie. The only negative I can see is the poor quality of Asian female actors. Except for Hiep who played the lead role, everyone else was bad to the point of being painful to watch.If a movie is supposed to tell the story and give the simulated experience of the people who are in the story, this is without a doubt one of the best movie I've ever seen.

Heaven and Earth (1993) follows Platoon (1986) and Born of the Fourth of July (1989) to conclude director Oliver Stone's Vietnam War trilogy. Where Stone won Best Director Oscars for both previous films, Heaven and Earth proved a box-office disaster and went unrecognized by the Academy, though Kitaro bagged a Golden Globe for his haunting score. It's hard not to suspect that racism underlay the commercial failure, for where the hit movies addressed the sufferings of white American soldiers played by Hollywood stars, Heaven and Earth focused on the fundamental victims, adapting the true story of a young Vietnamese woman, Le Ly, who goes from village girl to freedom fighter to wife of a US marine struggling to adjust to life in America to reconciliation in Vietnam. Superbly made, with a stunning performance by Hiep Thi Le as Le Ly, and powerful support from Tommy Lee Jones, this is intelligent, harrowing film-making that attempts to understand and bridge the divide between nations traumatized by war.

In a small Vietnamese village, Le Ly finds her whole world shattered by the Vietcong and the conflict within her country. After suffering torture, abuse and rape she leaves the village with her mother and heads to Saigon. Continuing to find herself taken advantage of, Le Ly's life continues to be shaped by the influence of men, whether it is bosses and soldiers or the politicians who guide and create the wars that bring the men into her otherwise peaceful life.Opening with sweeping music, beautiful landscapes and happy Vietnamese villagers going about their happy lives in happy ways, this film immediately had alarm bells ringing. It is of course commendable that Stone completed his trilogy of Vietnam films with a story from the Vietnamese point of view and it had the potential to be clever and subtle. Sadly neither of these words get a look in here. The true story itself offers much pain, many harsh judgements and much sadness; it also offers a portrayal of male/female relationship that works well as an analogy for the countries themselves. However Stone was not the person to deliver a sensitive piece that speaks for itself – instead he seems to doubt his audience and insists on ramming it down our throats from start to finish. It is the equivalent of having him come into your home, stand an inch from your face and yell at you for 2 hours; and it is a long two hours.The cast are more or less lost in the storm that Stone creates. Hiep Thi Le gets on with portraying Le Ly by just doing the best she can to suffer convincingly. I didn't think I got to grips with her as a person but this is perhaps less to do with her performance and more to do with Stone apparently not having a lot of interest in her as such. The support cast all turn in their simple characters well enough and most can point to the screenplay in their defence – Chen, Jones, Reynolds and a few other famous faces do their thing but it is Stone that dominates every scene and the film is weaker as a result.Overall then a commendable close to the trilogy in terms of approach but not at all in terms of delivery. I could discuss the finer points of plotting and performances or the factual nature of the story but these have all been nullified by Stone's hammering delivery, that squeezes all the emotion, intelligence and importance out of the story and leaves a film that is miserable and lacking subtlety and certainly not one that deserves Le Ly's life to work with.

silly questionbut is it a true account? and anyone know if it is based on a book? i saw this movie many years ago, it made me cry...definitely worth watching anyone know any more Vietnam war type movies based on the people in Vietnam during the war? i remember the story when she moved to the USA with tommy lee..it was really good to see her adapt to life there. And tommy lee did an excellent job, sad ending though..which i will not expose.okay a newbie to IMDb and its not letting me submit this because it has to be ten lines of text so i am just blabbering on and on because i really cant remember the details of the film, apart from the fact that it was strikingly powerful and very moving and very good..okay more than ten lines now