ctical requirements (blowing up a railroad junction) and the rights of a civilian population (killed just because they live on its perimeter)" (89). By avoiding such issues and focusing instead on typical war genre themes, anti-war films in general have done little more than create a sense of "unreality" about war (Hughes 10). Therefore, they cannot be called true anti-war films, but rather works of entertainment which incorporate certain anti-war elements.
The opinions of Paul Goodman and Colin Young came to public attention in the early 1960s, when the concept of the anti-war film was relatively new. Since the late 1970s, the anti-war film has come to be closely associated with America's responses to the Vietnam War. In the late 1970s, with such Vietnam War films as The Deer Hunter and Go Tell The Spartans, a new era in anti-war film was born. During the 1980s, with films such as Oliver Stone's Platoon, the new anti-war film based on the Vietnam War experience was further established. Because of the harsh criticism of the American people against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that war is now seen as an excellent vehicle for making a variety of anti-war statements. Nevertheless, the majority of films dealing with Vietnam which have emerged since the late 1970s also fail in their attempts to be true anti-war films. As noted by film historian Michael Paris, the late 1970s ushered in a new period in which the war, as experienced in Vietnam, has come to be presented more realistically than ever before. Yet, the bulk of these films have continued to utilize traditional war genre elements, thereby creating "a type of feature full of anti-war sentiments, but glorifying the individual soldier" (Paris 22). Such films have been critical to a certain extent regarding America's involvement in the Vietnam War, as well as the tactics employed by the Americans in fighting that war. At the same time, they have contin...