Film Excess - Free Ukraine - Stop Putin - End the war NOW!!: Heaven & Earth (1993) - Stone's 3rd Vietnam pic proves an overreach

5/27/2023

Heaven & Earth (1993) - Stone's 3rd Vietnam pic proves an overreach

♥♥

+ 2nd Worst Movie of the Year

+ Most Expensive Flop of the Year: 28.6 mil. $ range + Worst $ Return of the Year: 0.33 times the cost

A woman caught in a red sea of apparent internal conflict and strong emotions make up this fine poster for Oliver Stone's Heaven & Earth

An idyllic country life in Vietnam is ruined first by Frenchmen and later by the American invasion, so that the woman Le becomes a prostitute. She later moves with her American soldier husband to the US to raise a family, but he suffers from PTSD.

Heaven & Earth is written, co-produced and directed by great New-Yorker filmmaker Oliver Stone (Seizure (1974)). It is based on the auto-biographical books When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (1989) and Child of War, Woman of Peace by Le Huy Hayslip, Jay Wurts and James Hayslip.

Stone wants to complete his Vietnam War portrayal on film, following Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989) with a female, Vietnamese perspective on the war, but the width between the filmmaker and his subject here is too broad for the outcome to seem credible. Stone simply can't portray this meaningfully.

The film has powerful scenes, not least due Tommy Lee Jones' (Hope Springs (2012)) natural and devastating performance as a wrecked veteran, but it is over-all unfocused and over-loaded with narration. Unfortunately it belongs on the list of the weaker films by Stone.

Oliver Stone: 2016 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED II]

2016 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]

2016 in films - according to Film Excess

Snowden (2016) - Stone's inflammatory political thriller is a powerful must-see

2010 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED III]

2010 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED II]

2010 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps/Wall Street 2/Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps (2010) - Stone's sequel is an entertaining spectacle

1999 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess

Any Given Sunday (1999) - Stone's bloated sports epic is mostly for football fans

Nixon (1995) - Stone takes another president for a long run

1993 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess

Born on the Fourth of July (1989) or, Beautiful Struggle

Watch a 5-minute clip from the film here

Cost: 33 mil. $

Box office: 5.8 mil. $ (North America only)

= Uncertain but likely a mega-flop (projected return of 0.33 times its cost)

[Heaven & Earth premiered 25 December (USA, Japan) and runs 140 minutes. Shooting took place from October 1992 - January 1993 in Vietnam, Bangkok, Thailand and in Los Angeles, California. The film opened #17 to a 379k $ first weekend in 63 theaters in North America, where it peaked a couple of weeks later at #12 with a 1.7 mil. $ weekend, grossing 5.8 mil. $ domestically. The foreign market numbers are regrettably kept under wraps. The film sold 14k tickets in Denmark, coming to approximately 124k $. A tentative projected world gross of 11 mil. $ isn't unlikely. It would make the film a mega-flop. It won a Golden Globe. Roger Ebert gave it a 3.5/4 star review, translating to 3 notches over this one. Stone returned with Natural Born Killers (1994). Jones returned in Blown Away (1994); Hiep Thi Le (Julia (2008)) in Bugis Street (1995); and Joan Chen (Wonderland (2017)) in On Deadly Ground (1994). Heaven & Earth is rotten at 43 % with a 5.20/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of Heaven & Earth?

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Film Excess - Free Ukraine - Stop Putin - End the war NOW!!

Eagerly anticipating this week ... (6-24)