'Fires on the Plain' director Shinya Tsukamoto returns to his war-is-hell preoccupation, with a gratuitously repetitive take on the true story of a Black marine traumatised by the horrors in which he participated in "'Nam."
Plus IconJessica Kiang
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Courtesy of Kino Films, Venice Film Festival If Shinya Tsukamoto‘s “Mr Nelson, Did You Kill People?” were the first, or even the 51st, movie to litigate the atrocities committed by U.S. troops during the Vietnam War, perhaps on a purely informational level some justification would exist for its crudely simplistic approach. Nuance is often a casualty of war, especially when that war is ongoing or recently ended. But this is 2026, when — in contrast to the era in which the real, evidently heroic Allen Nelson, on whose memoir the film is based, toured his cautionary horror story internationally — you’d be hard pressed to find a substantial contingent unaware that the Vietnam War has since been judged a mistake so costly in human life and dignity that it forced arguably the most substantial reevaluation of American self-identity since independence.
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