The 20 Best Vietnam War Movies Of All Time – As Ranked By A Military Historian

John Wayne wins the Vietnam War in a movie that bears zero resemblance to the actual conflict – not least because it was shot in Georgia. It’s based on a bestseller by special forces veteran Robin Moore (who also wrote the book on which The French Connection is based), but US Army cooperation was contingent on Moore being jettisoned from the production and he was paid out. That might explain why this lionising version of events, in which Wayne’s upstanding Colonel Kirby tackles the villainous commies and cuddles some orphans, works better as a study of wartime propaganda than a movie.

The expert view: ‘Even watching in a black-and-white TV as a kid, The Green Berets seemed propagandistic – and that's exactly what it was. It was designed to build support for the war on behalf of this brave little democratic regime fighting against the Red Menace. Almost anything with John Wayne is bound not to be accurate.’

Mel Gibson and Braveheart writer Randall Wallace do the Alamo for Vietnam with this unquestioning slice of old-school heroism. It centres on the battle of Ia Drang in 1965 when the US Air Cavalry – like the normal cavalry, only with choppers – took on a much larger VC formation and a maelstrom of hot LZs and friendly fire. Gibson plays Lt-Col Hal Moore, a straight-arrow family man trying to lead his men through the chaos. With little effort to grapple with the complex reality of the war, it’s a big-budget footnote to Vietnam’s filmography.

The expert view: ‘We Were Soldiers brings us full circle back to The Green Berets – rehabilitating the Vietnam War as a noble struggle. Mel Gibson tries to recreate the gung-ho heroism of the early days of the war. The Air Cav win a victory at Ia Drang in 1965, but it ends up being illusory. “We win, but what do we win?”’

The Reagan presidency spawned a new breed of Vietnam movie. Inspired by the idea that American POWS were still being held in the country, they were men-on-a-mission flicks in which a band of grizzled veterans – sometimes wearing headbands, sometimes not – headed back to ’Nam to rescue old comrades. Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone delivered Missing in Action and Rambo: First Blood Part II respectively. This Gene Hackman effort, co-starring a puppyish Patrick Swayze, is just about best in class.

The expert view: ‘When I was in elementary school we used to wear MIA bracelets, a trick perpetrated by Richard Nixon. Support for the war was plummeting, so he said we needed to keep fighting until we got every POW home. It was rare for American ground troops to be captured, because they had a “nobody gets left behind” mindset. But in Central Highlands it was so dark you couldn't see your hand in front of your face. If a squad got lost, you couldn’t recover them.’

Robin Williams’ acting career arguably peaked relatively early in this M*A*S*H-style war comedy, which has him starring as a real-life American stand-up brought to Saigon to entertain the troops as a radio DJ and ruffling many feathers in the process. Director Barry Levinson allowed Williams to let loose in the on-air segments, imbuing the film with his signature crazed energy, but it’s also the film where he revealed largely unseen depth, as his infatuation with a local woman exposes him to the true toll of the war, changing his character along the way.

The Black experience of Vietnam is explored to ultra-violent effect in the Hughes brothers’ war film-cum-crime thriller. With the heist plot of a Heat and the homecoming heartache of The Deer Hunter, it pointedly asks why America abandoned its young Black veterans to PTSD, violence and substance abuse. If it feels like it shares DNA with Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods, it does: Wallace Terry’s 1984 tome Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans informs both movies.

The expert view: ‘When you read a lot of the Vietnam memoirs you’re struck by how shocking it must have been for these young men to be thrust into this cockpit of war. The Americans just end up just meting out violence in all kinds of ways that you have to imagine would affect your psyche.’

Spike Lee delivers a 21st century view on the war’s legacy, melding a journey back to the Central Highlands by a group of Black veterans (Delroy Lindo, Jonathan Majors, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis and Isiah Whitlock Jr.) with a treasure hunt straight out of a Bogart flick. With the late Chadwick Boseman playing their KIA comrade in flashback, there’s extra emotion at play – not that it needs it. The gold subplot is entirely fictional, but Lee honours the experiences of Black GIs in touching style as the old comrades wrestle with enduring traumas.

The expert view: ‘Tour companies in Vietnam still take groups of veterans into the rural areas to the battlefields. It’s just a fact that African-Americans were used as cannon fodder: they were 11 percent of the population and 23 percent of combat units. There was also a belief that Black soldiers were made to carry the M60 machine gun, which is heavy and makes them a target for enemy ambushes.’

The French perspective on Indochina gets a scene in the director’s cut of Apocalypse Now but for a proper insight into the sunset of France’s colonial ambitions in Vietnam – and the dawn of America’s – cue up this stately, gloriously shot Catherine Deneuve melodrama set in the 1930s. Director Régis Wargnier shot it on location in Hue’s Imperial City, among other Vietnam locations, which makes it one of the most authentic-looking films on this list. The themes tally, too, as Deneuve’s plantation owner falls for a naval officer and finds herself swept up with communists and the independence movement.

The expert view: ‘It’s a beautiful recreation of French rule in Indochina, but also shows how dissidents looked at the unjust way the French and their Vietnamese puppets were governing and looked for ways to improve it. The French were very much aware of what an uphill battle it was to put their empire back in the saddle in Vietnam.’

Hollywood doesn’t have a total monopoly on Vietnam War movies – North Vietnam produced a few after the war, including 1984’s When the Tenth Month Comes, and during it, the best of which is Hai Ninh’s tale of a cherubic Hanoi girl (Lan Hương) trying to find her dad in the wake of American B-52 bombing raids. Somehow made during the war itself, it transcends propaganda with humanist storytelling and loads of heart – like a Vietnamese answer to Grave of the Fireflies. Not to say that it’s above putting one over the imperialist enemy: one sweaty-palmed sequence shows an incoming bombing raid from the perspective of a SAM missile command post. 

The expert view: ‘It’s a touching movie about this little girl’s search for her parents when Nixon unleashes the B-52s against North Vietnam. LBJ (Lyndon Johnson) had always been surgical about bombing, but in 1972 Nixon said: “Screw it, I’m going to send in the B-52s”. All this murder and mayhem for nothing – in a losing war.’

Michael Cimino’s Best Picture winner drills deep into the ways Vietnam destroyed not just individual lives but whole communities, most of them working class. Boasting maybe the most stacked cast of the ‘70s – including Robert de Niro, Meryl Streep, Christopher Walken and John Cazale – it follows a tight-knit group of steelworkers in small-town Pennsylvania from home to the battlefield and back home, then back to the battlefield to reclaim one of their own. It’s best remembered for its controversial scenes of Vietnamese soldiers forcing American POWs to play games of Russian roulette, which is a shame – it’s not a movie that needs ahistorical embellishments to make its point.

The expert view: ‘These three immigrant steel workers from Pennsylvania were raised to think that they have to fight and die for their country. They go off full of idealism and come back crushed by the trauma of the war. POWs were held in conditions of unspeakable brutality, in tiger cages or buried in sand and very poorly nourished.’

The Incident on Hill 192, a notorious 1966 war crime in which a squad of US soldiers gang-raped and murdered a young Vietnamese woman, has been recreated in three contrasting, morally outraged movies – each based on the same New Yorker article. There was Elia Kazan’s The Visitors (1972) and even a German version,  o.k. (1970), before Brian De Palma got hold of it. He cast a fresh-faced Michael J Fox as a righteous grunt standing up to Sean Penn’s psychopathic sergeant in a grim-faced ’Nam flick that refuses to sugarcoat the war’s grimmest realities.

European nations swerved Vietnam but Australia signed up to support its US allies in South East Asia. This 1966 clash between the Australian Task Force and Viet Cong forces – the Australian’s key battle of the war – is a frequently thrilling, Zulu-like story of courage against the odds. This big-budget Aussie movie shows a hundred or so dogged Aussies pinned down in a plantation as 2,500 VC and North Vietnamese come at them from all angles. Mateship under fire makes for compelling viewing.

The expert view: ‘The film is named after the enemy getting in so tight [to your positions] that you couldn’t bomb or shell them – getting “danger close”. The whole idea in Vietnam was to leverage America’s superior firepower, so the VC tactic was to "grab you by the belt buckle", so that you could only use your small arms. And then it was an equal fight.’

Werner Herzog loves stories about quixotic characters struggling through jungles, so Vietnam is fertile soil for the German auteur. The subject for his pair of ’Nam movies, Rescue Dawn and 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, German-born Navy pilot Dieter Dengler was shot down over Laos, captured by Pathet Lao troops, stuck in a prison camp and tortured, before finally escaping. The films are both compelling, but an excellent Christian Bale, all scraggly beard and frail frame, lends the fiction version a dogged protagonist and a reminder that the landscape could be the war’s toughest foe. 

Five years after the last US troops got home, 1978 brought two classic homecoming pictures – The Deer Hunter and Hal Ashby’s more interior Coming Home. The former lingered on the trauma of the war itself, while the latter showed how it chewed up the lives, and relationships, of veterans long after they were out of danger. It’s a love triangle story in which Jane Fonda falls for a wounded war veteran (Jon Voight) while her buttoned-up Marine Corp husband (Bruce Dern) is in combat. It’s an endlessly sympathetic and deeply sad reminder that the war had two fronts – and no one came out of it unscathed.

The expert view: ‘I put it together with Born on the Fourth of July. They show this inversion: you go off with the bugles playing and the flags flying and you come back a broken man with your relationships in ruins. The Jon Voight character makes out with very well with Jane Fonda, and then Bruce Dern comes back healthy and he's lost his girl. Both films show another face of the war.’

Ex-US Marine Gus Hasford’s The Short-Timers is the source for a blackly funny screenplay that had input from Dispatches writer Michael Herr and director Stanley Kubrick. Hasford’s Marine journalist Joker, played on screen with larky irreverence by Matthew Modine, is our conduit through the dehumanising bootcamp at Parris Island and into the cauldron of Hue during the 1968 Tet Offensive. Kubrick offers a sardonic view of war that ends with the surviving Marines singing the Mickey Mouse March en route to the Perfume River.

Expert view: ‘I’ve talked to Marines who were in Vietnam who said Parris Island was pretty brutal. Full Metal Jacket catches the changing mood of the war: Joker is making statements you wouldn't have heard in The Green Berets. The final scene [of the men singing the Mickey Mouse song] was a Kubrick touch to show the Mickey Mouse bullshit of the war.’

One of the most violent Vietnam movies follows the efforts of an airborne regiment to take a hill overlooking the A Shau Valley near Laos. Don Cheadle and Dylan McDermott lead a mud and blood-caked soldiers slogging up a hill against dug-in North Vietnamese Army troops. The repetition rhythm of the action is the point: a ridiculous, pointless plan carried out with insane courage – over and over again. A nation smashing its head against a wall for no obvious gain. 

The expert view: ‘This was one of the most futile episodes of the war. There’s the great line where one guy goes: “We took the hill,” and his comrade says: “Well, what are we going to do with it?” This war was not about territory or tactical objectives; it was just about trying to find the enemy and kill them. But the enemy could choose the time and place of those encounters.’

Subtitled ‘Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S McNamara’, Errol Morris’s captivating, Oscar-winning doc is the last word in being wise after the event. A key player in America’s involvement in Vietnam, JFK and LBJ’s former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara goes on the record to talk about all the things he learnt along the way. What emerges is a portrait of hubris and American exceptionalism, with just enough humility to make its subject’s retrospection seem more than just self-serving. Morris brings it all to life with illustrative flair. 

The expert view: ‘I interviewed McNamara around the time the movie came out and he was very much different from the guy that we remember from 1960s newsreels when he was Secretary of Defense. He was much more like the crazy professor. It was too little, too late. He should have awakened to these realisations in 1968.’

Adapting Graham Greene’s 1955 novel, Phillip Noyce’s geopolitical love triangle is effectively a prologue to America’s official involvement in the Vietnamese conflict. A rarely better Michael Caine is an English journalist in Saigon covering the waning days of the First Indochina War. Brendan Fraser is a CIA man sent to manufacture terrorist attacks to blame on communist rebels. Both end up in their own personal conflict over the same young woman (Do Thi Hai Yen) – a metaphor for outsider involvement in the region. 

The expert view: ‘I really enjoy The Quiet American. It reflects Graham Greene’s prejudices as the facts on the ground, but Brendan Fraser’s character represents what the Americans thought about (corrupt South Korean president) Ngo Dinh Diem – that he was untainted by French colonialism and communism. But they never paused to ask if he had support among the Vietnamese people.’

Everyone involved nearly lost their minds making it, which might explain why Francis Ford Coppola’s war epic articulates the fever dream of Vietnam so perfectly. It seamlessly transplants Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness from the Belgian Congo circa 1890 to Indochina in 1969 – either an act of genius on behalf of Coppola and co-writer John Milius or a reminder that imperialism has a distinct rinse and repeat quality. Either way, Marlon Brando’s rogue Colonel Kurtz is the perfect avatar for a war that spun wildly out of control. 

The expert view: ‘It’s an allegory but it fits the reality of Vietnam. Colonel Kurtz was loosely based on the true story of a CIA agent who went into Laos and formed private armies. He’d leave skulls inside enemy positions. Did US troops ever surf? There were some R&R locations on the coast, so I imagine some guys who surfed would have tried to surf.’ 

Vietnam’s physical legacy for US veterans was often punishing, with maiming injuries increasingly common later in the war. Once an idealist who happily signed up for duty, Bronze Star-winning war hero Ron Kovic (a career-best Tom Cruise) was paralysed by a VC bullet, condemning him to bleak hospitals, agonising rehab and life in a wheelchair. Oliver Stone’s powerful film is story of curdled patriotism and disillusionment, but also renewed purpose when Kovic becomes a figurehead for the antiwar movement. 

The expert view: ‘You meet Ron Kovic playing “army” in the backyard as a kid. When he gets to Vietnam, he's thrilled with his status as a real soldier, but then he gets shot and paralysed and his whole life is upended. It really brings home the risks and dangers of war.’

Charlie Sheen’s idealistic GI is an avatar for Oliver Stone in a movie that represents the filmmaker’s experience of the war in panoramic, harrowing style. Another Vietnam veteran, Dale Dye, put its bratpack cast through a brutal pre-movie bootcamp, ensuring deep authenticity, while the uniquely traumatic nature of the war – booby traps, ambushes, drugs, massacres – are all here in detail. A Best Picture winner, it kicked off Stone’s Vietnam trilogy, with Born on the Fourth of July and Heaven & Earth showcasing different aspects of the war’s aftermath.

The expert view: ‘Stone puts you into this infantry company "ass in the grass", coping with the uncertainty of the war: the patrols, the night, the ambushes, the horrible weather. It was, by turns, hot, cold, wet, dry… just really miserable. Platoon gives a really good sense of what a tour in Vietnam was like.