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" Of all the great war movies made after Vietnam, Born on the Fourth of July is in a way the least respected. It opened to huge critical and commercial success, and won Oliver Stone the Best Director Oscar, but it has not received the same place in film history as Oliver Stone&amp;#039;s other Vietnam picture, Platoon, or the other great war movies of the period: The Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket, and Apocalypse Now. Its status, on the second tier of the very best, is undeserved. Because seeing the film twenty-five years after its release, it has grown terribly and cruelly relevant again. Sadly, in the aftermath of Afghanistan and Iraq, the movie is just now coming into its own.  Its relevance emerges from a strange source: its intense reliance on clich\u00E9s. The other Vietnam films all went the other way, into grittiness and absurdism. The Deer Hunter was a portrait of the men destroyed by Vietnam, but it was also a deft and profound portrait of life among Russian immigrants in Pennsylvania. The opening wedding scene of that film, constructed with such loving care, sets up the horror of the scenes in the jungle. The terror of the war becomes so vivid exactly because the banality of the homeland \u2014 the lousy storefronts, the filthy bars, the rusty cars \u2014 is so accurately recreated in the first place. The great war movies of World War II were celebrations of heroism, mostly, or love stories set against the sweep of history. But the basic story of World War II was victory over the forces of evil. Vietnam was about intense suffering for reasons that were unclear. Realism was in a sense the only response because there was no fantasy to turn the story into. Full Metal Jacket is almost oppressively visceral. It&amp;#039;s just about overwhelming experience after overwhelming experience without much meaning. Apocalypse Now explodes with believable senselessness, a carnage of anecdotes strung together on the way to a revelation that ultimately fails to produce any sense of method at all.   Born on the Fourth of July is not like those other masterpieces, even though it occasionally has flashes of violence or horror. The story is sentimental, based on the true story of Ron Kovic, a Marine from small town America who is paralyzed from the mid-chest down after being shot in Vietnam, and whose harrowing journey as a war vet ends with him joining the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and protesting at the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami. Stone creates a backdrop of pure Americana against which to tell Kovic&amp;#039;s story. The small town where Ron is born is wholesome with a capital &amp;quot;W.&amp;quot; The boys play war games in the fields as the world&amp;#039;s most obvious example of foreshadowing. The prom is the central emotional event of the boy&amp;#039;s teenage years. The American flag flies over every store. The streets are all clean and patrolled by classic cars that show no rust. The first thing we see in Vietnam is the murder of innocent civilians, and a murdered mother with a baby left crying on her corpse. The politics are crude: Kennedy is hope, Nixon is despair. The hippies are the hippies out of central casting, and the Vietnam vets all have unkempt moustaches and beards. There are whores with hearts of gold and revelations in the Mexican desert and many, many other standard film-school plot devices. Born on the Fourth of July was the last time that Tom Cruise really tried to be Al Pacino, and he was the perfect actor for the role \u2014 the standard relatable good-looking American boy. His face itself is like a cipher for the United States of America. And yet, despite the familiarity of these symbols, their power is real and incredibly consistent. Some clich\u00E9s are clich\u00E9s for a reason. The most upsetting feature of watching Born on the Fourth of July twenty-five years later is how contemporary it seems. Young, idealistic men enter foreign wars for patriotic reasons, have their bodies destroyed, and return to a mixed response from the country that sent them \u2014 adulation in the form of widespread parades and incredibly lousy treatment in Veterans Affairs hospitals. Sound familiar? The VA hospital in Born on the Fourth of July is the most harrowing part of the entire film \u2014 rats openly walking the halls, patients abandoned for hours in their own filth, doctors scarce and uncaring. The latest scandal at the VA hospitals happened just a month ago. Even after America learned the dangers of small foreign wars in Vietnam, apparently America has to learn them all again, over and over again.   I am tempted to ask, where is the Born on the Fourth of July for our time? There have been decent films made about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, like The Hurt Locker and Brothers, but they have not reached the classic status of any of the great Vietnam war movies. The reason for this may be the saddest reason there is: In many ways, the story has already been told. The tragedies of Iraq and Afghansitan were the same tragedies performed forty years earlier. Which makes them even more tragic. The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket are of their time and place \u2014 they are films of an America that has vanished. But Born on the Fourth of July is a story that not only happened in real life but keeps happening, that is happening right now. It reveals America&amp;#039;s bizarre and tormented relationship to the men who fight the nation&amp;#039;s wars, and which has now become even more extreme. Barely a sports event can occur in the year 2014 without a veteran being ritualistically celebrated. And yet the last two presidential administrations have both failed to ensure decent care for veterans at government hospitals. And this is not a minor failing in the grand scale of things: There are currently 900,000 men and women who have been treated for injuries by the VA since coming back from war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan. That&amp;#039;s a significant portion of the population. The horrifying relevance of Born on the Fourth of July is identical to the size of that number. The movie, even today, tells a story that nearly a million Americans can relate to directly. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a29207/born-on-the-fourth-of-july-25-year-later/>