Currently, the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary about the Vietnam War is airing on PBS, and many different media outlets have discussed the documentary itself, as well as the impact and legacy of the Vietnam War itself. Here is just a small selection of press reaction.
Mark Feeney from the Boston Globe opines on how the documentary strives to have every voice and opinion about the war heard. With this objectivity however, the filmmakers “leave one unavoidable lesson for viewers to draw. It’s the most horrifying thing in a story full of horrors: how administration after administration kept getting deeper and deeper into Vietnam despite suspecting it was a mistake or knowing it outright. Inertia, and politics, were in the saddle, and hundreds of thousands died as a consequence.”
The New York Times notes how the documentary not only covers the war itself, but the factors leading up to it such as the history of French colonization in Vietnam and the rise of Ho Chi Minh. Ultimately, it is “Mr. Burns’s saddest film,” according to the Times, due to the fact that the historical events it covers did not have an ending with any positivity, unlike the events covered in Burns’s other films, and that the documentary is “less an indictment than a lament.”
Finally, The Economist discusses the series and the war in the context of both American and Vietnamese perspectives:
“The series will be equally wrenching for Vietnamese viewers. The conflict was a civil war, numerous Vietnamese interviewees insist—“down to the family level”, says Duong Van Mai Elliott, a Vietnamese-American academic from the South whose sister went north to join the communists.”
Leave a Reply