Reviews

SPOILERS! WARNING; SPOILERS A very poor documentary loaded with half-truths, lies, and apparently very little research. Not too informative and certainly different from court transcripts and interviews many years ago. I guess some memories change over the years.

The Dan Rather, 60 Minutes, interview with Paul Meadlo on TV and the Life photos lead to the arrests. And some soldiers under Calley were arrested, charged and were waiting trial. Those charges were dropped after Medina was found not guilty.

There were no shots fired that morning except by the US military. The first shots came from a helicopter that murdered an innocent farmer.

Although there were some arbitrary murders at first, when they entered My Lai two groups of inhabitants were gathered up and executed by Lt. Calley, and Paul Meadlo.

Then the village was torched, people were shot by their huts and along the road.

Many soldiers didn't take part in the murdering of those innocent civilians.

Calley was convicted of killing 109 civilians. Medina was charged with killing the woman (witnessed by helicopter crew) and a little boy running from the village. The estimate of murders that morning range from 300 to over 500.

There's a brief scene with the photograph talking about his photo of some living women and children and he states he turned around and they're all on the ground.

He saw who shot them.

After that group was gathered together, Calley ordered Meadlo and another soldier to take care of them. Calley left, returned and asked why they didn't follow his order: had meant to waste them. One soldier (from RI) refused and walked away. Meadlo, crying, and Calley murdered those people.

At the ditch, two soldiers refused and walked away as Meadlo and Calley killed the first group thrown in the ditch. A two year old boy ran from the ditch. Calley chased him, caught him, threw him in the ditch and shot him. That boy was one of the 109 people he was convicted of murdering.

There's is no rational excuse for what Calley and Medina did. I don't think the documentary even touched how responsible those two really were. The orders Medina gave his troops and his officers wasn't mentioned in the video. Although Medina denied giving those orders during his trial, the numerous witnesses were quite believable.

I thought "The Woodsman" was okay. The acting was very good all around, especially Kevin Bacon. The story is weak but interesting. There were a few small surprises along the way. Nothing major. Don't expect tears or any laughs, just good acting. The ending was a disappointment to me. I expected something to happen (along the lines of "Taxi Driver"), but very little does. I'd recommend watching this on HBO. It's not worth nine bucks to see on the big screen. A very low budget movie that couldn't have taken more than a week to write the screenplay. It's only eighty minutes long. It would be very easy to add another thirty pages to the script. There were a lot of questions left unanswered.