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Critic Reviews
Sep 18, 2017
Season 1 Review:
Time and again, over a span of more than 35 years, we find Burns constructing bridges that insightfully and profoundly link Americans with their history. Nowhere has that been more powerfully true than in the 18 hours of his stunningly realized, intricately detailed 10-part film, The Vietnam War.
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Sep 18, 2017
Season 1 Review:
All of it folds together into an immersive and wrenching creation that left me genuinely curious as to whether viewers will have the stamina to spend several nights in a row with the series. Certainly watching The Vietnam War is one of the most worthwhile ways to spend time with your television this fall. Just as certainly, committing to doing so will wear a person out.
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Sep 18, 2017
Season 1 Review:
Burns and Novick are less interested in scoring political points than they are in the idea that world-changing events look so different when you’re trapped in them. More than in any other Burns miniseries, The Vietnam War lets you feel what it’s like to be crushed under history’s heel.
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Sep 15, 2017
TV Guide MagazineSep 14, 2017
Season 1 Review:
A powerfully affecting elegy to a turbulent time. [18 Sep - 1 Oct 2017, p.26]
Uncle BarkySep 14, 2017
Season 1 Review:
In its scope and a mostly impeccable selection of images, quotes and anecdotes (Ho Chi Minh once worked as a New York city pastry chef), The Vietnam War boldly and bravely stands its ground and almost assuredly will stand the test of time. Its story is told in affectingly human terms by the mostly unheralded men and women who bled, died and survived.
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Sep 14, 2017
Season 1 Review:
Astounding and sobering. ... It clocks in at 18 hours--a length as daunting as its subject, yet worth every single minute of your time. I’ll go so far as to call it required viewing, before you watch anything else on TV that will come (and probably go) this fall season.
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Sep 14, 2017
Season 1 Review:
The Vietnam War is both the most powerful film Burns has produced, and the most despairing. ... By the end of the fascinating, sometimes wrenchingly hard to watch 18 hours, it's impossible to regard the Vietnam War as anything other than an agonizing failure, one that taught Americans to be cynical about a government that lied to them, sent Americans off to risk their lives, and made one costly bad decision after another.
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Sep 16, 2017
Season 1 Review:
But for all the documentary's merits, it does its best work in ferreting out the bite-size experiences of the grunts, not just the ones in uniform but the CIA officers, junior diplomats, peasant farmer and family members back home—the people didn't make policy but were whipsawed by it. Their stories are poignant, confusing, heartbreaking, maddening, blackly funny, or cryptic, often all at once.
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Sep 15, 2017
Season 1 Review:
It’s a mammoth, epic undertaking that starts with a smart opening episode. “Déjà Vu,” beautifully written by Geoffrey C. Ward, manages to both deliver the expected (images of Vietnam, first-person accounts of fear and heroism in combat) and the unexpected (a history of the conflict that drills down beyond the immediate run-up all the way back to the beginning of French colonialism in 1858).
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Sep 14, 2017
Sep 13, 2017
Sep 14, 2017
Season 1 Review:
While The Vietnam War is unmistakably a Ken Burns/Lynn Novick/PBS documentary, its use as a document suffers somewhat from an aesthetic allegiance to itself. There are moments in which The Vietnam War might have stepped out of its tidy bunker and utilized some of the oceanic research and interviews that have been done by others since the war ended in the mid ’70s.
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Sep 8, 2017
Season 1 Review:
The strength of The Vietnam War comes from these 80-odd interviewees, who offer a glimpse into the psyches of people on all sides of the conflict--from reluctant American draftees to enthusiastic North Vietnamese recruits. ... At times, the length of The Vietnam War detracts from its appeal. Even with the headings, it can be hard to keep the years and offensives straight.
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