Film Review - Danger Close: The Battle of Long Tan (2019)

Danger Close: The Battle of Long Tan takes place in South Vietnam in 1966 where an Australian regiment of soldiers took on a huge force of over 2,000 Vietnamese soldiers as they look to surround a nearby Australian base but those soldiers will not go down without a fight.

Danger Close for most of the time is trying to replicate the “You are there” feeling of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk from 2017 where you mainly follow this group of soldiers stuck behind enemy lines with time and supplies running short while home tries to mount a desperate rescue and for the most part it works fine enough and has some good action scenes but it doesn’t quite pack that same punch that Dunkirk had.

And that’s really due to the filmmaking on show (and its handled by good people in Kriv Stenders the director and his screenwriter Stuart Beattie) not being up to par and look its hard to match Mr Nolan who is a real master of his craft and made Dunkirk really special but here the pace at times drags out and the character moments become a bit predictable where those who talk about their lives at home may as well have a bullseye painted on them the entire rest of the film.

That said there are some good performances by people like Luke Bracey, Richard Roxburgh among others but their just fine and as Mr Nolan showed so well in Dunkirk sometime its better for people not to talk and just pass notes around and lastly the jungles of Vietnam probably isn’t best to be shot in Queensland as the Wetlands are pretty obvious in some shots.

And that was Danger Close: The Battle of Long Tan and its fine it has some good action and a nice enough war story but watch Dunkirk instead, 2 and a half out of 5.