4 reviews
Started out watching this and only on episode 1.
Already not even 20minutes in the foundation has been laid that Ho Chi Ming wanted to turn Vietnam into a communist country and that is what started the war.
Are we just going to leave out the letters he sent to the President of the USA asking for Vietnam to be free of French rule in consideration of the documents signed at the end of WW2? That Ho Chi Ming asked the USA for help? Not Russia, not China. After being ignored then labelled communist they took the French in themselves.
They didn't want a war, they wanted their homeland to be theirs again.
If the truth prevails throughout I will happily come back and edit this review. I will continue to give forward with the documentary but I just had to get this out there.
Already not even 20minutes in the foundation has been laid that Ho Chi Ming wanted to turn Vietnam into a communist country and that is what started the war.
Are we just going to leave out the letters he sent to the President of the USA asking for Vietnam to be free of French rule in consideration of the documents signed at the end of WW2? That Ho Chi Ming asked the USA for help? Not Russia, not China. After being ignored then labelled communist they took the French in themselves.
They didn't want a war, they wanted their homeland to be theirs again.
If the truth prevails throughout I will happily come back and edit this review. I will continue to give forward with the documentary but I just had to get this out there.
- najagogoddard
- Apr 29, 2025
- Permalink
My first realization that I should take everything I see with a grain of salt is the overuse of discredited anchor Dan Rather, who was vocally critical of George W. Bush and, do to the use of false documents alleging Bush received preferential treatment in the Texas Air National Guard, was fired from his anchor position at CBS Evening News.
The horribly poor job they did on this that I have personal knowledge of is their coverage of Operation Babylift in 1975, as the US government decided to evacuate thousands of South Vietnamese orphans, many of whom were children of US military. One of, if not the first, flight was carried out by a C-5A cargo aircraft, which lost decompression after takeoff and came apart in a rice paddy when trying to make it back to the Tan Son Nhut airport. What happened was the locks on the rear loading ramp failed, and this occurred because locks had been cannibalized from that airplane, replaced with ones that in the rush weren't properly tested, and several didn't lock properly. The remaining locks couldn't withstand the pressure at 23,000 feet, and when the ramp locks blew, a hydraulic line was severed hampering control of the aircraft.
So what did they get wrong? Repeatedly, footage of the test C-5A at Lockheed Martin in Marietta, Florida is shown - this one had a long, yellow nose probe sticking out that was used during testing. They use various footage of this plane over and over - though that was only used during initial testing. As if that isn't bad enough, at one point in the narration, they supposedly show the cockpit of the plane with the pilot's hand on the throttle . . . And the pilot's coat sleeve is a commercial airline pilot's sleeve, with the stripes . . . Not an Air Force pilot's flightsuit.
Now that you know what caused the failure, you'll understand why it's so egregious that this overly dramatic former CIA agent, who is used repetitively throughout the series, says "The canopy covering the loading dock BLEW OFF! Somebody had forgotten to latch a Goddamn lock!"
There is no "canopy covering the loading dock" to blow off. And no, somebody didn't forget "to latch a Goddamn lock." That's not how the doors work.
What's infuriating is this idiot's slanderous statements could have been corrected had someone taken less than a minute to look up the incident on Wikipedia.
Anyway, that's what made me suspect the entire series. Other than very briefly, in the first episode, there's little criticism of the North Vietnamese, and these folks did some amazingly horrific things throughout their decades of attempting to inflict communist rule on their peaceful, democratic neighbor to the south.
The horribly poor job they did on this that I have personal knowledge of is their coverage of Operation Babylift in 1975, as the US government decided to evacuate thousands of South Vietnamese orphans, many of whom were children of US military. One of, if not the first, flight was carried out by a C-5A cargo aircraft, which lost decompression after takeoff and came apart in a rice paddy when trying to make it back to the Tan Son Nhut airport. What happened was the locks on the rear loading ramp failed, and this occurred because locks had been cannibalized from that airplane, replaced with ones that in the rush weren't properly tested, and several didn't lock properly. The remaining locks couldn't withstand the pressure at 23,000 feet, and when the ramp locks blew, a hydraulic line was severed hampering control of the aircraft.
So what did they get wrong? Repeatedly, footage of the test C-5A at Lockheed Martin in Marietta, Florida is shown - this one had a long, yellow nose probe sticking out that was used during testing. They use various footage of this plane over and over - though that was only used during initial testing. As if that isn't bad enough, at one point in the narration, they supposedly show the cockpit of the plane with the pilot's hand on the throttle . . . And the pilot's coat sleeve is a commercial airline pilot's sleeve, with the stripes . . . Not an Air Force pilot's flightsuit.
Now that you know what caused the failure, you'll understand why it's so egregious that this overly dramatic former CIA agent, who is used repetitively throughout the series, says "The canopy covering the loading dock BLEW OFF! Somebody had forgotten to latch a Goddamn lock!"
There is no "canopy covering the loading dock" to blow off. And no, somebody didn't forget "to latch a Goddamn lock." That's not how the doors work.
What's infuriating is this idiot's slanderous statements could have been corrected had someone taken less than a minute to look up the incident on Wikipedia.
Anyway, that's what made me suspect the entire series. Other than very briefly, in the first episode, there's little criticism of the North Vietnamese, and these folks did some amazingly horrific things throughout their decades of attempting to inflict communist rule on their peaceful, democratic neighbor to the south.
If history is an objective recounting and analyzing of facts, this series is the very opposite of that.
Its producers have unleashed a tendentious, self hating and manipulative "documentary" that, from the get-go, spares no effort in portraying the USA as the aggressor and antagonist in a conflict it had no business interfering in.
Brushing aside as insignificant such factors as Soviet post WWII expansionism which saw it expropriating Eastern Europe for itself, the attempted placement of missile bases near US soil and gradual takeover and exploitation of country after country worldwide, the miniseries attempts to debunk the ridiculous notion of a communist conspiracy by suggesting a far more plausible one- an American conspiracy.
If the show is to be believed, the Americans, beguiled in their ignorance ("nobody knew where Vietnam was") by a cunning, malicious leadership, were actually the bad guys, terrorizing the poor, misunderstood natives in an attempt to swindle them of their homeland.
Never mind that the USA never had any motive or interest in furthering its hold on Vietnam other than the stated and obvious one- to hold communism at bay; there are always plenty of sinister, mysterious evil figures lurking in the background in the form of Presidential advisors etc. To shift the blame to... not the innocent Vietcong who are simply caught in the crossfire and entangled against their will.
Do yourself a favor and stick to those documentaries that stick to facts rather than spinning a fiction as this one does.
Its producers have unleashed a tendentious, self hating and manipulative "documentary" that, from the get-go, spares no effort in portraying the USA as the aggressor and antagonist in a conflict it had no business interfering in.
Brushing aside as insignificant such factors as Soviet post WWII expansionism which saw it expropriating Eastern Europe for itself, the attempted placement of missile bases near US soil and gradual takeover and exploitation of country after country worldwide, the miniseries attempts to debunk the ridiculous notion of a communist conspiracy by suggesting a far more plausible one- an American conspiracy.
If the show is to be believed, the Americans, beguiled in their ignorance ("nobody knew where Vietnam was") by a cunning, malicious leadership, were actually the bad guys, terrorizing the poor, misunderstood natives in an attempt to swindle them of their homeland.
Never mind that the USA never had any motive or interest in furthering its hold on Vietnam other than the stated and obvious one- to hold communism at bay; there are always plenty of sinister, mysterious evil figures lurking in the background in the form of Presidential advisors etc. To shift the blame to... not the innocent Vietcong who are simply caught in the crossfire and entangled against their will.
Do yourself a favor and stick to those documentaries that stick to facts rather than spinning a fiction as this one does.
Yet another thinly disguised propaganda piece, dressed up in the respectable trench coat of "documentary filmmaking." You know the type: fractured timeline, ominous voiceovers, and a noble attempt to rewrite history with just enough fog to keep you squinting.
We start with the French colonizing Vietnam (classic move), then getting booted out with the reluctant help of the Americans, who, bless their hearts, were anti-colonial and anti-communist, because nuance is for the weak. Sadly, anti-communism won out, and the U. S. promptly launched itself into a conflict that was, frankly, none of its business. Enter the chaos.
The documentary paints this descent into madness with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, offering the usual: the U. S. government lied (shocker), over 50,000 American soldiers died for absolutely nothing (tragedy, agreed), and the public was kept in the dark while the suits played Risk with real lives.
So far, so good - except when the film starts showing a little too much affection for North Vietnam, portraying it as a kind of scrappy "Liberation Force," rather than what it also very clearly was: a communist regime that set up lovely little re-education camps and sent the South Vietnamese population fleeing in droves. The documentary conveniently glosses over this, as if dissenters were simply fussy diners sending back a revolution they didn't order.
And then there's the delightful moment when we see huge portraits of Ho Chi Minh looming over adoring masses. This is always a bad sign and a reminder of the huge portraits of Stalin and Mao shown to the masses, for them to bend over.
The grand finale: we're told the Americans never should have been there (agreed), but then criticized for pulling out, as if abandoning the South was the ultimate betrayal. So... which is it? Damned if they do, damned if they don't?
Also, there is already enough with the sidebar on American domestic politics. We get it -Johnson was a mess, Nixon was worse, and everyone else fumbled the ball. But must we revisit Watergate every time someone mentions Southeast Asia?
Even if Turning Point tries to be a sober reflection on a tragic war, it mostly succeeds in being a sanctimonious mess with selective memory and a crush on authoritarianism.
We start with the French colonizing Vietnam (classic move), then getting booted out with the reluctant help of the Americans, who, bless their hearts, were anti-colonial and anti-communist, because nuance is for the weak. Sadly, anti-communism won out, and the U. S. promptly launched itself into a conflict that was, frankly, none of its business. Enter the chaos.
The documentary paints this descent into madness with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, offering the usual: the U. S. government lied (shocker), over 50,000 American soldiers died for absolutely nothing (tragedy, agreed), and the public was kept in the dark while the suits played Risk with real lives.
So far, so good - except when the film starts showing a little too much affection for North Vietnam, portraying it as a kind of scrappy "Liberation Force," rather than what it also very clearly was: a communist regime that set up lovely little re-education camps and sent the South Vietnamese population fleeing in droves. The documentary conveniently glosses over this, as if dissenters were simply fussy diners sending back a revolution they didn't order.
And then there's the delightful moment when we see huge portraits of Ho Chi Minh looming over adoring masses. This is always a bad sign and a reminder of the huge portraits of Stalin and Mao shown to the masses, for them to bend over.
The grand finale: we're told the Americans never should have been there (agreed), but then criticized for pulling out, as if abandoning the South was the ultimate betrayal. So... which is it? Damned if they do, damned if they don't?
Also, there is already enough with the sidebar on American domestic politics. We get it -Johnson was a mess, Nixon was worse, and everyone else fumbled the ball. But must we revisit Watergate every time someone mentions Southeast Asia?
Even if Turning Point tries to be a sober reflection on a tragic war, it mostly succeeds in being a sanctimonious mess with selective memory and a crush on authoritarianism.