i really liked this movie. I never got into Bill Paxton too much, but this was as good as I've seen him act. The film seemed really authentic void of a few scenes and maybe even relationships. Donal Logue is pretty young and Im pretty sure this is one of his first films to have starred in. A lot of the characters are recognizable, be it from Clint eastwood Dirty Harry films to even Robocop. Eric Bogdosian pops up within the film surprisingly for a stint as a coworker soldier and even plain civilian I think. There's not much for me to say because I wasn't alive during this time, but the film basically goes from 1963 to 1969 during its duration.

Something in his past keeps career Army man John Paul Vann from advancing past colonel. He views being sent to Vietnam as part of the US military advisory force a stepping stone to promotion. However, he disagrees vocally (and on the record) with the way the war is being run and is forced to leave the military. Returning to Vietnam as a civilian working with the Army, he comes to despise some South Vietnamese officers while he takes charge of some of the U.S. forces and continues his liaisons with Vietnamese women. A Bright Shining Lie is unfortunately a very mediocre film and although the acting was good i felt that Bill Paxton was very miscasted here and i did not like the way they flash out his character also most of the things that happen here are actual real life footage and i totally get it this is a TV Movie and also from HBO but if Forrest Gump could do it so could they right? But overall a life disappointment (5.5/10)

This film is interesting in comparison with Go Tell the Spartans, which came out 20 years earlier in 1978. The earlier film starred Burt Lancaster, who is less than gung-ho, unlike Paxton in Bright Shining Lie. What is similar in both films is the way both men begin to realize that what is really happening on the ground in Vietnam is quite different than what the administration is telling the public and the administration refuses to hear the truth from the soldiers on the ground, giving orders that actually get soldiers killed. Paxton's character just keeps upping the ante, refusing to back down, insisting that he can somehow win this war and work around the military leaders. Lancaster gives up on fighting the military leaders and just stays with his men in the field. In Court-martial of Billy Mitchell, Gary Cooper is another gung-ho soldier in an even earlier time period, the 1920's, just after World War I, when airplanes were new to the military. He wants to create an entire Air Force, which both the Army and Navy think is unnecessary. He somehow predicts a future when the USA's fleet at Pearl Harbor is attacked by bombs from Japanese airplanes (how did he guess that?) and foresees the need for a modern air force. He is willing to sacrifice his military career to get that message across. Again, a fascinating film in which the top military leaders refuse to listen to the soldiers in the field (this time in the air vs. on the ground) and these soldiers die because the leaders refuse to listen. These three films certainly show that the military is a pretty bad place for soldiers whose lives may be unnecessarily sacrificed by the commanders who refuse to listen to the people actually fighting the war.

Neil Sheehan's masterpiece tells the Vietnam War story through a single biography. John Paul Vann was an American who overcame a humble background & made a distinctive, heroic career as a soldier, adding a beautiful wife & 3 kids along the way. Preparing for promotion to high rank, he went to Vietnam in the early 1960s as an adviser, one of the select few to take the fight against Communism right into combat. But Vann was also a man with deep personal issues: haunting, shaming memories of childhood poverty, a weak father & a libertine mother, leading perhaps to his own aggressive infidelities including one with an underaged girl that nearly led to court-martial. And his "fight" in Vietnam was merely a series of bureaucratic exercises in which the Americans were bogged down by South Vietnamese intrigues, both unwilling & unable to do what was necessary to defeat the Communists. Terry George explores this theme with the steady pace, methodical yet engrossing, that was later such a triumph in the remarkably similar "Hotel Rwanda." Paxton has his work cut out as the very complicated Vann, a dedicated soldier who is not only everything an Army officer should be, but also a true warrior whose devotion to victory trumps his loyalty to the establishment & thus even his own career. Yet Sheehan's Vann has a shocking capacity for self-harm, hating the ignominious background that was not his fault, indulging himself in sexual adventures that wounded his family & threatened his career as readily as he embarked on reckless combat missions. It's all Paxton's show & he takes us on a fascinating odyssey of an officer whose slow realization that the Army would rather lose the war by the book than win it by tossing away the book (it's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game?) causes him to leave the Army but, after a short, sad foray into business, return to Vietnam as a civilian administrator who steadily accumulates unique, vast military authority. Paxton's Vann wants to understand Vietnam's people & culture--but only enough to help him in his war effort--leading him to turn his back on his tormented family & take a Vietnamese wife (Wu). But for Vann, everything in his life is devoted to victory, a personal goal, an intense obsession, that he will achieve whether America or Vietnam like it or not. Paxton is suitably restrained, uttering no war cries like Stallone or Norris, making no personal journey of self-awareness or redemption as in "Apocalypse Now" or "Uncommon Valor." The professionalism of the art of war is his mantra, the belief that the everlasting principles of the true warrior will realize the high ideals of democracy & capitalism over the despair of communism. George doesn't give Paxton the opportunity to go too deeply into Vann's personal life (the book WAS very long, after all), so Vann comes across as a complex but not quite complete antihero. The other actors are there to help paint the Vann picture rather than those of their own characters. Madigan is very fine as Vann's loyal wife driven to despair as much by Vann's obsession with the abstract concept of victory as his gross infidelities. The superb Kurtwood Smith gives the best film portrayal of Westmoreland ever on screen--decisive, firm, unapproachable, unhearing--though he has only minutes to do it. Kay Tong Lim is as restrained as Paxton in depicting the clever Colonel Cao, Vann's ARVN partner & as self-serving as Vann is idealistic, who goes from being Vann's great hope to his frustration to his nemesis. The action scenes are low-budget & unremarkable, but audiences were long ago falsely conditioned to view Vietnam as a series of either personal or spectacular cowboy-vs-Indian fights. Vann's presentations for Pentagon & White House big-shots, in which he dramatically holds up handfuls of rice to underscore the importance of winning over Vietnam's farmers, are far more poignant. If the Vann of Sheehan, George & Paxton has a valediction, it's that the war was lost in Washington, not in the field--a view that's hardly original but is still very hard to wrap one's mind around. Many viewers will find "A Bright, Shining Lie" quite unsatisfying entertainment, but that's the problem with dramatizing nonfiction, the risk of presenting a story that's trying to teach. But, if it tries to teach, it doesn't try to preach, and at least the sun doesn't set in the East.