A group of American soldiers (and
one German guy, played, I believe, by one Robert
Marius) are rescued from a Vietnamese jungle prison by American operative
Cecil (Clive Wood). During exfiltration, the men are ordered to
reclaim some important papers that were being transported in a now-downed
helicopter. But the helicopter’s cargo
may be more valuable than mere documents (okay, it’s gold). All of this is told in flashback to writer
Christopher Hilton (Christopher Hilton,
perhaps better known as a voice actor for such films as Five Deadly Venoms) by one of the survivors.
Romano Scavolini’s Dog Tags (aka
Dogtags - Il Collare della Vergogna aka
Platoon to Hell) is a film about the
ugly truth of humanity. Like Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust, it frames this discussion through an
observer/audience surrogate character who unveils this truth after the events. In that film, Professor Harold Monroe (Robert Kerman) reviews the footage left
behind by the “victims” of the jungle slaughter as it’s reconstructed. In this film, Hilton interviews Tanoy, the
only known survivor of the events from so long ago. Both films construct a truth from the
evidence of the past, and in this sense, the films are about storytelling and
about revealing said truth through storytelling. Dog
Tags even structures its tale in acts (Prologue, Act One: The Facts, Act
Two: The Getaway, Act Three: The Chase, and an Epilogue), plainly telling us
that this story, though conveying truth, sticks to the framework of classic
storytelling. It’s presented to us as a
fiction in order to relate fact (it even gives us a quote from a United States
Senate hearing about the preceding premise in general; whether these hearings
happened or not, and whether this subject was actually discussed is
inconsequential here [personally, I find it all very easy to believe, so
mission accomplished], as it’s the intimation that it’s true which matters).
Hilton first comes to this
particular story through a guy named Jack, a radio operator who was stationed
in Nam at the time (whom we never see in this capacity, or if we do, he’s never
identified to us in the film, and he plays no part in the plot outside of also
being an observer). Tellingly, Jack has
overdosed on heroin as the film opens, so we never get to see him in the
present, either. What this does is
informs us that what he encountered during his tour of duty was too much for
him to deal with emotionally. To
paraphrase Colonel Nathan Jessup, he couldn’t handle the truth. Likewise, the characters in the film cannot
handle what’s happening to them. This
isn’t a Kelly’s Heroes type of
War/Caper film. Many of the characters
in Dog Tags die, and they die very
badly. Primarily, they are picked off by
booby-traps, of which there are tons in the film. In fact, I can think of very few direct
interactions between the soldiers and any actual Viet Cong. The enemy is mainly faceless, absent in body,
if not in spirit. The one exception I
can recall is the scene where Glass (Peter
Elich) is told to wade into the tall grass and get the Viet Cong skulking
there. Faced with the situation of killing one with a machete, Glass hesitates,
cracks, and then turns on his comrades. Like
the jungle the men traipse through, the Viet Cong threat is ever present,
overwhelming and surrounding the soldiers on all sides. There is no escape from the enemy in the same
way that there is no escape from the jungle.
Pushed to the brink, the men either die or go insane (often both).
If it wasn’t bad enough for the
men to be stuck in a Viet Cong cage, it’s far, far worse for them in the open jungle. Things were bad in the cage. The men were at each other’s throats, but
they survived. Once freed, things
degenerate swiftly, and between the paranoia of the unseen adversary and the
weariness of the soldiers being faced with another mission when they clearly
aren’t up for it, the men become animals, become corrupted. Once the gold is discovered, the soldiers’
avarice shines through, and their humanity is lost completely. This is best exemplified by Roy (Baird Stafford) whose leg is injured by
a booby trap hidden in a river. His leg
becomes gangrene, and it has to be amputated as the infection spreads. The amputation scene displays the totality of
the notion that this is a place which humanity has fled. As his fellow soldiers set to work on the
leg, we get a shot from Roy’s POV. His
companions’ faces are gaunt, feral, and sickly.
They could as easily be preparing to remove his leg as his life. The contrast to this evaporation of humanity
is Mina (Gigi Dueñas) and her family
(including her brother Tanoy and her elderly father). The family are taken hostage by the soldiers out
of fear that they’re in league with the Viet Cong. We are never told explicitly whether or not they
are; it’s the tension of the situation that counts. At any rate, Mina services Roy with her hand
as his health fails. She does this
without a word, without a readable emotion on her face, but the empathy she
feels for Roy in this circumstance is clear.
While the men are losing their minds with anxiety and greed, Mina
performs an act of kindness that is both compassionate and empty. Mina and her family have lived in these
conditions far longer than the soldiers.
They understand that this is the state of the world (and not just their
localized world in a case of the specific highlighting the general), so a
modicum of physical pleasure is all there is to make life bearable, and even
then it’s as transitory and meaningless as the act itself.
I was surprised as hell when I
watched Dog Tags. I had expected something along the lines of Enzo G. Castellari’s Inglorious Bastards or Bruno Mattei’s Strike Commando, essentially a loud, dumb, fun action film with a
lot of explosions. And while there are a
lot of explosions (and it should be said, they are large and extremely
impressive) and a thin, gritty texture of exploitation in Dog Tags, the film maintains an utterly serious tone from start to
finish. This is a grim, bleak, cynical
film that reflects on its ugliness rather than revels in it, much of the
runtime filled with strained, formidable silence. I won’t say that Scavolini’s film is as powerful or as slick as something along the
lines of The Deer Hunter or Apocalypse Now, but I do think it
deserves to be in the same conversation with them.
MVT: Scavolini does a remarkable job crafting tension in almost every
moment of the film while doing it on a believable scale for a War picture.
Make or Break: The first booby-trap
that’s tripped comes swiftly, unheralded, and it delineates the stakes of the
film for both the characters and the audience.
Score: 7/10