On L List of Movie Reviews

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The Last Full Measure (2019)

Rate: 8
Viewed: 3/21

3/21: In the spirit of Courage Under Fire, The Last Full Measure is a true story of making a Medal of Honor case for a soldier who was killed in action while saving numerous men.

At the beginning, I thought of turning off the film due to horrible editing. Changing my mind, I decided to stick with it a bit more, and then things got better afterwards. It's hard to say which worked more: the story or the acting. Perhaps, it's been a combination of both.

On the surface, the cast looks unbelievably all-star including a couple of long esteemed actors who'll pass away within two years, but it's Sebastian Stan who deserves the most credit for making the movie work by piecing together a puzzle of what happened.

Yes, Sebastian Stan looks robotic for a long time, but the most powerful scene is his character being at where the incident happened in Vietnam. That's when he started to change his thinking by recognizing the gravity of the whole thing while everybody else had already been personally affected by it for a long time.

Pretty much, the movie is about righting a wrong for William H. Pitsenbarger, an Air Force Pararescueman. He took part in almost 300 rescue missions during the Vietnam War, and one day, on April 11, 1966, he saved over sixty men under enemy fire before getting killed. At first, he was awarded the Air Force Cross when it should've been the Medal of Honor due to weak documentation. It took thirty-five years for the award to be finally upgraded.

All in all, for what it had been two decades in the making, The Last Full Measure may have failed at the box office ($3.4 million versus a budget of $20 million), but it's absolutely worth watching.

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