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If the genie conventions of the Vietnam film are easy to isolate (first-person voice-over narration, rock and roll music, helicopter battles), even to parody, its narrative structures are not. Directors have used mythic superstructures (Apocalypse Now), melodrama (Platoon), and documentary techniques (84 Charlie Mopick). Beyond convention, what links the "serious" films on the war is not narrative, but a political stance; they have followed Means and Minds (1975) in depicting the American involvement in Vietnam as an unmitigated disaster.
But there is another school of Vietnam war films, the films epitomized but by no means exhausted in Rambo (1985), that take their lead not from Hearts and Minds, but from the Green Berets (1968). Films of the political right, they do not condemn the American involvement in Vietnam, but they condemn the American defeat; they do not portray American soldiers as tragically misplaced teenagers, but as heroes betrayed. These films constitute a sub-genre of the Vietnam War film, a sub-genre that is more homogeneous, more narrowly defined, than the genre from which it branches.1 For not only do these films share a political thrust, but, unlike the serious films, they share a narrative: they all revolve around the American prisoner of war experience. Their protagonists are or were POWs, and their main action is the rescue of POWs still being held in Vietnam.
This story line, the rescue of the American POWs from the Vietnamese, is followed exactly in Good Guys Wear Black (1977), Uncommon Valour (1983), MIA (1984), Rambo, POW the Escape (1986), and Operation Norn (1987). It receives variation in MIA II (1985), a prequel, which depicts the escape of POWs themselves during the war. MIA III (1988) is about the rescue of a school of Amerasian children from present-day Ho Chi Minh City. Hanoi Hilton (1987), while not an escape film, details the suffering of American POWs in North Vietnam's most infamous camp. In Rambo III (1988), Rambo, himself once a POW, rescues his friend from Russian-occupied Afghanistan. This prisoner/rescue format has proven so popular that producers have transplanted it to increasingly unlikely locales: The Rescue (1988) moves the action to contemporary North Korea.
These films also share a specific political subtext and a literary form which are important to our understanding...