The Greatest Beer Run Ever

     This will be a shorter blog post than usual, not necessarily because I have little to say about this movie, but because all that can be said about this film is best explained in shorter terms. For too long, I have held myself to a certain standard about what a "worthy" movie to watch should look like: over 2 hours, nominated for several awards, niche and unknown to 99% of the general public, etc. However, there are some movies that are objectively pretty stupid that I really enjoy (see This Is The End) that seem to break these standards on what's "worth" watching. To celebrate the birthday of a dear friend of mine, me and my buddies watched one of these movies: The Greatest Beer Run Ever.

    This movie tells the true story of a guy called Chickie (played by Zac Efron) who travels to the front lines of the Vietnam War in order to bring his buddies from home some beer, hopefully raising their morale while he searches for his best friend who was declared Missing In Action. Throughout his travels, he learns about the war effort and how the government has lied to him about how well its going. At the start of the film, he is a staunch patriot, showing up to anti-war protests to yell at protesters and harass them, but by the end of the film, after witnessing the horrors of war and the lengths the government will go to keep secrets quiet, he takes up the mantle of protesters and remains an advocate for the end of the war until his friends return.

    Off the bat, I was really surprised that the film tackled how the social divide around the Vietnam War had formed, especially in the damaged relationship Chickie initially has with his protester sister. I feel like with revisionist history and the benefit of hindsight, many Americans don't like to acknowledge how pro-war we used to be, feeding into the American "We Are Number One" ideology that still lingers to this day. With modern education systems labelling the Vietnam War as a failure and a mistake, many new generations (including my own) don't really have a way of imagining how that sort of pro-war vs anti-war divide could look, at least not without conflating the past with modern foreign wars, which have their own intricacies and fog of misinformation that I'm sure will be looked back upon in the future with distaste.

    What I mean to say about all of this is that by portraying Chickie, our protagonist, as a red-blooded, pro-war American type, you associate the audience's perspective with his, which subtly influences the way we think about the Vietnam War in the movie. Even though you can start watching the film with the current position of "that was a mistake," as soon as you start associating with Chickie's worldview, you become just as radicalized and blinded by pro-war propaganda as he is. This makes it all the more impactful as Chickie discovers the realities of the war and the horrors that are happening in Vietnam, which is both inflicted and suffered by American soldiers. It's just a natural way of getting the audience to arrive at the opinion the filmmakers want them to reach, even if that was the opinion most viewers held originally.

    While this isn't the craziest movie ever in its writing, cinematography, or acting, I still thought that there was something to be appreciated in this movie. Though it was a somewhat unremarkable film to most people, I think that what the film was able to achieve, even if it is redundant with public opinion now, was an interesting example of how movies are able to shape the perspectives of the audience in subtle and effective ways. I don't think I'm going to start touting this film as an inspiration for any future projects, but I do believe that I learned a lot from the potential this film had, and the effect it had on me while watching. Fun watch!