Excellent martial-arts historical movie: The Rebel

An uncomfortable movie to watch because of the US’s own role in Vietnam (and our own successful war to throw out our own colonial rulers and become independent), The Rebel is set at an earlier stage, when French controlled Vietnam as a colony. One can readily see in watching the movie why the Vietnamese rebelled against the French and wanted them out of their country, and it was clearly a mistake—and an unnecessary one—for the US to jump in to follow the path the French had traveled. Lots of talk at the time about dominoes and domino theory (the idea that if Vietnam goes Communist, nation after nation will follow inevitably—note that Vietnam is now Communist and it turns out that nation after nation did not follow)  pushed us into it, but it was a conflict we would have been better to pass on.

Still, despite the discomfort, an interesting movie with some very good martial arts sequences.