Few films before the late 1970s about the Vietnam War actually depicted combat.[66] The exceptions included The Green Berets (1968).[66] Critics such as Basinger explain that Hollywood avoided the subject because of opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War, making the subject divisive; in addition, the film industry was in crisis, and the army did not wish to assist in making anti-war films.[66][67]
From the late 1970s, independently financed and produced films showed Hollywood that Vietnam could be treated in film. Successful but very different portrayals of the war in which America had been defeated included Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter (1978), and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979).[66] With the shift in American politics to the right in the 1980s, military success could again be shown in films such as Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986), Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987) and John Irvin's Hamburger Hill (1987).[66]
The Vietnamese director Nguyen Hong Sen's The Abandoned Field: Free Fire Zone (Canh dong hoang, 1979) gives an "unnerving and compelling .. subjective-camera-eye-view" of life under helicopter fire in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam war. The film cuts to an (American) "helicopter-eye view", contrasting painfully with the human tenderness seen earlier.[68]