Beautiful, moving, powerful
10/10
Author: Christine (river@riverblue.com) from Minnesota, USA
17 January 1999

An excellent film, an emotional powerhouse! Not only is the story itself so moving, but it is greatly enhanced by the style: the way the camera moves during certain scenes, sounds that resurface from the past, the wonderful selection and timing of songs and the score, the use of color and light, etc. Tom Cruise slips effortlessly into his role; within moments you forget Tom Cruise the Actor, and see him only as Ron Kovik.

I put off seeing this film until just recently because I thought it was mostly fighting and bloodshed; but it instead delves into many years of one man's life, and how just a few moments of war changes him forever.

An Excellent Anti-War Film
10/10
Author: TheArizonian2014 from United States
8 October 2011

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Born On The Fourth Of July, is considered part of Oliver Stone's "trilogy" of films about the Vietnam War.It includes Platoon and Heaven & Earth.It gave him an Oscar for Best Director.It is a film adaptation of the best selling autobiography of the same name by Vietnam War veteran Ron Kovic,who was paralyzed during the Vietnam war and who later becomes an anti-war as well as pro-human rights political activist. Tom Cruise plays the role of Kovic excellent which allowed him to get nominated for an Academy Award.

The rest of the cast includes Kyra Sedgwick,Raymond J. Barry,Jerry Levine,Frank Whaley and Willem Dafoe. The film takes us to different part of Kovic's life like his youth;on how he develops his passion to join the marines;his tours in Vietnam;how he got paralyzed from the mid-chest down;when he joins the joins Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW); and travels to the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami to protest the on-going Vietnam War.The movie ends with Kovic's speaking at the 1976 Democratic National Convention,shortly after the publication of his autobiography.

The movie touches on the theme honestly on physical and mental anguish Ron Kovic suffered as he lost his ability to walk.Aside from that,he also lost his ability to have children as well.Aside from that,it also touches on the emotional stress that the war brought him.Finally,it also makes room for his transformation from an idealistic youth to an anti- war propagandist. In the end,the Oliver Stone did succeed in presenting the ill effects that war brings to Americans who severely suffered from it.Overall,this is one of the best anti-war movies ever made in film history.

Underrated masterpiece
10/10
Author: toddalan-5 from Australia
4 November 2005

This film directed by the great Oliver Stone is masterpiece both Stone and Cruise who is the main character in the film are at the top of there game. Both one of there best work they have ever done. Stone showing America going through conflicts at one of its worst time in recent history is also powerful. Being Australian myself it is easy for my country to relate to it has will being that Australia went through the same ordeal as the US did.

Its starts of with Tom Cruise a young man wanting to go to war to serve his country but comes back disabled and never being able to walk again. The rest of the film is about America soldiers getting back to there home country were people blaming them for the war and other things. Stone one best director but Crusie got robbed at winning a Oscar for his role.

"Who's gonna love me now.....?"
10/10
Author: fred-houpt from toronto
10 August 2007

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

I waited until August 2007 to see this film and I'm sorry I waited so long. Stone's films usually are so strong that when they enter the mass market the ripples are large, his messages often creating feverish backlash. Few are left on the fence and like Michael Moore's films, they are polarizing, entertaining, often jarring and disturbing. Stone is a man who was in Viet Nam and saw it all up close. As such he was well suited to comment on the war and comment he did over several excellent films. Ron Kovic's story was an appropriate addition to Stone's collection of 'Nam films, coming as it did only three years after his seminal "Platoon".

There have been many Vietnam war films made and this film is certainly one of the most moving I've seen. It is always tempting to get drawn into clichés about war, using stereotypes as a replacement for depth in writing and insight. Stone is a fine writer and director. Along with Kovic's own words and experience, this film manages to honor the appropriate focus, which is Kovic's journey into a drama that began as a patriotic desire to do the right thing.

What is remarkable about Kovic's journey is how much he matures in such a short time and how he managed to change his mind about a war that he volunteered to enter. Like so many of his generation, he was initially convinced that Viet Nam was a far flung battle between American style freedom and lifestyles and the oppressive and expanding web of communism. That these ideas were a leftover of the anxieties and illusions of the Cold War was not apparent at that time. In fact one could honestly say that America had not really admitted how lost it was in Indochina until an aged and contrite Robert McNamara recently wrote how his generation of leaders had been completely wrong about Vietnam.

There has not been a more socially divisive war since Vietnam and it's hard to argue that there will be one again. Coming as it did as a huge change in society evolved, the war became the ultimate metaphor for all that was wrong with the American vision. Gone were the halcyon days of the American's as liberators, beloved in lands across the world as World War II ended. Now the nightly news showed atrocities with American soldiers as the perpetrators. Kovic's tour of duty shadowed all of these changes. His treatment by an underfunded and somewhat indifferent veterans hospital only added to the process of disillusionment and bitterness that was to lead him to completely transform his attitudes towards the war.

That he was abused, spat at and beaten by those who would not listen to his anti-war words finalized and crystallized his transformation from soldier to anti-war activist. All of this came at a huge cost to himself. Whoever said Tom Cruise was not a great actor should see this film. Consider that he was all of 27 years old when the film was released and watch how brave his performance was. His ability to travel from starry eyed child of the 50's, his head full of the previous generations glory at bringing liberation to millions, his belief that communists were the evil empire, all the way through purgatory into realizing that there was no truth to this vision. Cruise gives a stupendous and raw performance, holding back nothing, tearing open his emotions to reveal the depth of Kovic's spiral into total despair.

Ah, then there is Willem Dafoe. His character, so completely destroyed by the ravages of what he had done as a soldier, so aflame in self loathing and grief, he can no longer even recognize that "Kovic" is a mirror image. The scene of them spitting on each other, wrestling each other out of their wheelchairs is so tragically upsetting that one wants to avert the eyes to see such pain.

This is a film to watch several more times. If there are finer essays on the loss of dreams, the transformation of America into a frightening military powerhouse, equally as intimidating and dangerous as they themselves feared the Russians were, than I do not know of it. There is much in this film to consider and given our current state of yet another American disaster (Iraq and Afghanistan), a film that has not aged one drop. A triumph for Stone, Kovic, Cruise and Defoe.

It is almost the 4th of July 2005, this movie's important message is applicable to Iraq.
10/10
Author: golem_number1 from Toronto
3 July 2005

I am a Canadian and I grew up during the Vietnam war. In the media, I read and saw it as it happened and also personally knew Vets, C.Os, dodgers, deserters; they all had their reasons for doing what they did and all suffered in their hearts and minds and it nearly tore America apart. The Vietnam war was a tragedy and Oliver Stone's film portrayed it in a very important way which should have made everyone very reluctant to pursue a similar military conflict.

Now, many years after the war in Vietnam, the world is experiencing the war in Iraq (In spite of what Bush says, it's still an ongoing war). The message in Born on the Fourth of July needs to be retold, either by re-releasing the film or newly made to relate to Iraq. Although I am not an American (some of my family are and one of my brothers and his family has emigrated to the U.S.), every day I think about the agony and misery that Americans are going through in Iraq and in the U.S. for a war which is supposed to be about liberation and democracy but has turned out to be otherwise.

I think about the U.S. soldiers and civilians who support them who are endangered, killed, and we must never ignore or forget the psychologically and physically wounded who will have to live with the terrible consequences of their experiences. Born on the Fourth of July resonates into the present.