The Vietnam War

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.

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.

A must-watch: The most important TV program of the year.

Those who lived through the period should find "The Vietnam War" a highly emotional experience. But even their kids and grandkids should hear and see echoes throughout this epic undertaking, which forges a bridge from America's past directly to its present.

Burns and Novick have engineered a staggering feat of filmmaking ambition, so overwhelming and raw it’s sure to rip open still-fresh scabs of those who lived through it.

A powerfully affecting elegy to a turbulent time. [18 Sep - 1 Oct 2017, p.26]

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.

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.

Hour for hour, it’s one of the best things I’ve seen on TV this year--but because it frequently comes so close to becoming not just impressive but important, challenging, even agenda-setting. But it never quite pushes itself over that line.

"Be prepared to weep." Those words also apply to the experience of watching these 18 hours. That is no small tribute to Burns and Novick--and a reminder of how much the war remains with us.

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.

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.

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).

The Vietnam War is less an indictment than a lament. This is where Mr. Burns and Ms. Novick’s primary-source interviews are so effective. Arguably, the most important Ken Burns effect is not a visual trick but the refocusing of history on first-person stories.

While not quite a documentary war of attrition, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's The Vietnam War stretches over 10 nights and 18 hours, and even though you feel that length at every turn, the series is meant to wear you down. And yet it's impossible to look away.

As otherwise powerful as The Vietnam War is as a film and a historical document, it misses a significant opportunity to go beyond the rhetorical “for what?”

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.