Point Man is a 2019 war film set three months after the tide-turning Tet Offensive and one month after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
All things considered, there’s a lot to take notice of in writer/director Phil Blattenberger‘s debut Point Man, a Vietnam War film with a big agenda. While it’s common to call an independent film like this ambitious, it’s not a stretch to say that Blattenberger does things that aren’t always expected, at least considering his limitations. Point Man wrestles with many obvious conventions of the genre, but does have a solid story to tell, even if the result can’t live up to what most expect from bigger studio releases.
It’s late 1968 and in the jungles of Vietnam, a small platoon of soldiers sets out again after losing their point man in an ambush. A few of the men, including Andre “Casper” Allen (Christopher Long), an African American cynical of the way things are run by Lieutenant Sutter (Matthew Ewald), feel politics are keeping blacks at the front. However, when another ambush leaves four of them separated from the others, they press on in their mission, finding along the way a test of their loyalties and courage in the face of death.
Most mainstream war movies are all about dipping a few broad-stroke characters into jarring wartime horror. Massive action-packed set pieces of traumatizing violence have come to define them, from Oliver Stone‘s Platoon to Steven Spielberg‘s Saving Private Ryan. Blattenberger doesn’t have the bodies or production to pull off something of that scale, so spins his story around the personal conflicts, crafting a kind of tricky crime drama in the thickets of Southeast Asia.
Casper, two other black men, Joe (Chase Gutzmore) and Felix (Marcus Bailey), and a bigoted white man named Meeks (Jacob Keohane), come upon a ‘lost’ platoon who have been out of contact and taken to questionable ethical behavior when dealing with local Vietnamese. It doesn’t mix well with Casper’s philosophy of what the war has come to be and the politics of what’s happening back home in the states. Just who are the good guys?, he wonders. And are there really any in all of this?
Lots of Vietnam War movies have tackled some of the reported atrocities born of the conflict, from raping and killing innocent civilians to burning down whole villages. What happens in Point Man however is something altogether different as Casper and his men come to take on a sort of vigilante crusade, roaming the countryside making decisions about some unsettling things happening when command falls apart. The setup is familiar but I assure you, the outcome is not.
It’s an intriguing idea with plenty of potential that Blattenberger works hard in keeping authentic, first and foremost the setting making it all the more believable as much of the film was shot on location in parts of Vietnam and Cambodia. However, CGI gun barrel flashes, tepid sound effects, and copy/paste choppers in the sky limit the few skirmishes dotting the 80-minute film. It’s easy to target these bits because most low budget titles like this tend to overdo bad visual effects. At least Blattenberger pulls back the reins and only uses them sparingly. More obvious though are how every single Vietnamese is dressed in pure black with clean white nón lá hats, with barely a word spoken from any of them (until one does and sort of states the whole movie’s message). They look like stock characters from central casting, even if there is some truth to the way they look.
Still, weirdly in a war set in Vietnam, this is not their story. This is about a few Army men on a dark journey, trying to make their way to a path of righteousness in a place where none exists. Weakened slightly by a few wooden performances and some moments that don’t ring true, Point Man comes together in other ways by the story it tries to tell, avoiding some of the more immediate tropes in favor of something more morality-driven. It doesn’t always work but there’s no taking away from Blattenberger’s enthusiasm for the project. Worth a look.