Check Out the Trailer

It’s taken awhile for me to catch this film, which came out about a year ago. Disney’s traditional animation division has been turning out mainly average productions for nearly a decade now. Most of their big-budget failures were done in LA.. but this flick was greenlit with a small budget and done without the looming eye of execs in Orlando, Florida. What we get is a free-for-all from director, writer and voice of Stitch Chris Sanders’ imagination.

The story is simple: an alien scientist Dr. Jumba (David Ogden Stiers, THE MAJESTIC) creates the ultimate destruction machine, Stitch, who is exiled from his home planet and sentenced to live on an asteroid. He escapes and ends up on Earth where, to avoid capture by Dr. Jumba and agent Pleakley (Kevin McDonald, TV’s KIDS IN THE HALL), he poses as a dog and is adopted by Lilo (Daveigh Chase, SPIRITED AWAY) and her older sister Nani (Tia Carrere, WAYNE’S WORLD), who is trying to raise her little sister after their parents’ death. Both Lilo and Stitch are perfect cases for anger management therapy and create havoc in Nani’s life, spurring social worker Cobra Bubbles (Ving Rhames, PULP FICTION) to consider sending Lilo to a foster home.

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Check Out the Trailer

Upon seeing the trailer for this film I thought “Oh goodness, Mel Gibson is doing a Vietnam version of BRAVEHEART like he did an American Revolution version with THE PATRIOT.” However, I was surprised by the solid reviews and comparisons to BLACK HAWK DOWN. And after seeing the movie, I can say that I enjoyed this film better than BLACK HAWK DOWN.

The story follows the events of the first land battle in Vietnam where 400 U.S. soldiers were helicoptered into the battlefield and found themselves surrounded by 2,000 Viet Cong. The film begins in the U.S., introducing us to the various characters. Lt. Col. Hal Moore (Gibson) is a Korea veteran and a Harvard graduate who studied international relations. He’s worried that he’s leading his Battalion of the Seventh Cavalry, which was Custer’s regiment, into an ambush. He’s a strong man and a wise leader with a strong religious faith.

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