A Fellowship of Valor

The few, the proud, the insufferably self-congratulatory. U.S. Marine history has been--in truth--an often heroic and sometimes tainted affair (I offer the word "Panama" here), but this high-testosterone tribute not only ignores any negative overtones, it puts a roseate glow on military maneuvers that even the general public knows were problematic (I offer the phrase "Saigon airlift" here). Based on the prominently featured (Ret.) Colonel Joseph Alexander's book of the same name, the film devotes about five minutes to the years 1775-1914, five more minutes to WWI, and more or less splits the rest between WWII, Vietnam, and the war in Iraq. Filled with fairly gruesome imagery and some stirring first-hand accounts, the scripting itself is alternately boring (dates, places, numbers) and wretched ("the going was filled with horror"). I do not mean to denigrate the U.S. Marines or their quite considerable achievements in our military history, but A Fellowship of Valor is a self-addressed valentine not a critical history. Liable to be popular, this is nevertheless an optional purchase. Aud: C, P. (R. Pitman)