The greatest movie ever made..!

It is a performances centric movie

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

It's so shockingly sad to see the real poorly trained Marines in combat. Just a bunch of YOYOs, screaming their heads off when they were dropped behind the enemy line. All they did was just shooting blindly to somewhere in front of them. They carried so many gears in their backpack that made them very difficult to run in the field. What we heard from the commanding officer was just a bunch big and hollow words, trying so hard to encourage those young Marines to do a good job, but once they were on the ground, heard bullets whizzed around them, all they could do was screaming to each other, hiding from some obstacles and kept shooting blindly to their general random front directions. They have wasted so many bullets to shoot nothing. We were used to be fooled by many movies telling us how cool, how brave and how well-trained the US Marines, how tough they were, how they got even tougher jobs after they did several tours. The overly glorified US Marines stories were just like fictions, fantasies that could only exist in daydreams.This documentary if on the basis of exposing how terrible the US Marines during combat, it should got 10 stars, because it had vividly shown us how pathetic the Marines were in general. But if you take it from a different patriotic angle, this documentary sucked big time, it did nothing to glorify the US forces, especially the Marines. They have mindlessly wasted their lives wherever they were thrown into. All of them just looked so lame, so timid, so scared, all they could and would do is just shooting blindly to their unknown enemies. What a pathetic documentary since what it showed to us only made us shaking our heads constantly.

The documentary starts off with a thought provoking contrast. We land in the middle of a deadly Afghan war scene, only to see the marines' family reunion in America shortly after. This contrast suggests the frightful incompatibility of these scenes, and hints at the question of how the marines cope with this.During the story of Nathan back home, our point of view shifts from time to time to the Afghan war scene. These suggest the flashbacks that Nathan experiences.Ironic scenes from Nathan playing Call of Duty confront the viewer with the barbarity it is of reducing war to an enjoyable video game.The strongest moment in the film features one of Obama's speeches touching on the Afghan war. The film suggests the ridiculousness, emptiness and idiocy of Obama's idealized speeches about war, and subtly subverts it when a wounded and indifferent Nathan comments: "Well, Afgan people aren't watching." This film suggests that even physically unharmed marines come home profoundly wounded, be it emotional. Nathan's neurotic and unpredictable behaviour makes us question what injury cuts deeper, the physical or the emotional.

This film troubles me. The quality of shooting and editing is excellent, but I'm somewhat unnerved by what the possible consequences of exposing so much about a damaged individual could do to harm their already fragile metal state. A man who is obviously struggling to make sense of his rapidly diverging ideals is here used as fodder for sensationalism - Danfung Dennis does not hesitate to fictionalise Nathan Harris by crudely overdubbing scenes of him struggling during physical rehabilitation with the sound of warfare. Harris is treated as a puppet and it is never explained why. I don't remember Harris himself mentioning flashbacks? This film was either poorly edited or poorly conceived of, but I would say it is still worth watching simply to understand the manner in which the war in Afghanistan is being portrayed to the public at large, a public that have reacted positively to the film in the most part.

"Hell and Back Again" chronicles the return of Sgt. Nathan Harris' return home and the result is interesting, disturbing and somewhat lacking. Sgt. Harris, is a Marine and always wanted to be one. He wants to fight (and "kill") and almost thrives upon it with his obsession with guns. However, after taking an injury in the field in one of the most violent areas in Afghanistan, Harris goes through rehabilitation back home to try and get his life back on track. The focus of the movie is almost entirely on Sgt. Harris and that both helps and hurts the film. While this does offer personality towards the subject matter but it is difficult not to watch "Hell and Back Again" and wonder what this would have been like with other people as subjects as well as outside opinions about Harris himself. The film ends up almost lacking as it tries to alternate between life at home and life (sometimes clumsily) in the military with little to no interaction with anyone else but Harris. Outside of flashback sequences, none of the other members within Harris' Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment are given much development in regards to the narrative which is a shame because most of the segments in Afghanistan are by far the most interesting of the documentary. In the end, "Hell and Back Again" attempts to become the Marine Corps equivalent of "Restrepo" in terms of depicting military life and ends up somewhat missing the mark. It's not an awful documentary, it just could have been so much more than what it was.