1968 Tunnel Rats is made by Uwe Boll, a director whose name has been regularly associated with entertainment’s worst films if you read critical reviews.
This new film of his though is a huge improvement: it has the advantage of centering on a relatively untouched aspect of the war, and his production this time keeps its focus squarely on just that without getting too distracted with the niceties of character development or sophisticated narratives.
With the sole exception of actor Michael Paré who plays a grizzled Sergeant, the rest of the cast all comprise unknowns to me, but still look reasonably distinct from one person to the next.
The 90 minute film includes a 30 minute-long prologue and setup which introduces the company of American soldiers who’re part of a special unit trained to enter these tunnels and fight the Viet Cong on their own turf.
Once character development play time is over, the film moves into gear when the soldiers set out to clear a section of tunnels. And the film goes into high tension mode that exemplifies exactly the conditions in this type of warfare: brutal, claustrophobic, and utterly suicidal.
Crawling and fighting through these tunnels back then was indeed no joke: the tunnels were very small – which meant that only soldiers of relatively small stature could be on these missions – and full of horrible traps, including grenade-laden trip wires, spike traps, and death by drowning in water holes. And that’s not even including the close-quarter hand-to-hand combat the soldiers had to wage in those small tunnels, all frequently lying on their stomachs or backs while at it.
Tunnel Rats in other words, isn’t an easy movie to watch. Fighting in these tunnels essentially is all about attrition in this film: you get one of them but lose one of yours, and it goes on and on. One film element that really works in sync with the context of the film’s theme is that while the individual soldiers aren’t faceless, you can never tell who’s going to bite the dust next as small groups of them enter the tunnels and try to complete their mission. The tension will had me chewing on the seams of the sofa cushions!
The very few soldiers who survive the underground battle at the film’s end… well, they have to deal with problems of an entirely different nature when they surface. Suffice it to say that the ending is tragic, and will leave you numbed with both admiration at the horrific conditions both sides’ soldiers worked under, and sadness at the wastefulness of that war.
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A small part of these underground tunnels today have been restored in Vietnam, and is apparently a major tourist attraction even where visitors can crawl through these tunnels themselves to relieve this part of history.
If the Vietnamese government is serious about imparting to visitors just how scary these tunnels were in reality, they should consider running 1968 Tunnel Rats at the entrance of these tunnels. Absolutely not for the faint-hearted.
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