Men Of Honour/Tigerland/The Thin Red Line Cuba Gooding Jr. 2003 DVD Top-quality

A triple bill of high-tension dramas. In ‘Men of Honour’ Carl Brashear (Cuba Gooding, Jr.), an Afro-American recruit with the U.S. Navy, discovers his vocation in life when he is transferred to an elite training school for deep-sea divers. Yet despite the recent abolition of segregation, Carl still suffers from the lingering racism it has left in its wake; finding himself rejected by many of his fellow trainees, victimized by the school’s bigoted commanding officer Mr Pappy (Hal Holbrook), and pushed to breaking point by chief training officer Billy Sunday (Robert De Niro). Nevertheless, Carl refuses to quit and soon he and Sunday establish a mutual respect which will see them through their many subsequent trials. ‘Tigerland’ is set in Louisiana, 1971. When new recruit Jim Paxton (Matthew Davis) arrives at Fort Polk for basic training he soon makes friends with the rebellious Roland Bozz (Colin Farrell), a soldier who is doing everything he can to get himself thrown out of the army. Bozz has plans to escape to Mexico, but Paxton refuses to go with him, arguing that if he doesn’t go to Vietnam, then somebody else will have to go in his place. However, when Bozz makes an enemy of his vengeful and sadistic fellow recruit Wilson (Shea Whigham), the need to get out of the army becomes even more pressing. Whilst ‘The Thin Red Line’ is set in 1942 and was Terrence Malick’s first film for twenty years. As US soldiers land on the island of Guadalcanal, hoping to capture it from the Japanese, the job of venturing into the jungle falls to the ‘C for Charlie’ company and the troops are faced by both the enemy and struggles within their own camp. The war takes a heavy toll upon the young soldiers, leading them on a path of disillusion and possibly death.