100 84 CHARLIE MOPIC [AKA 84C MOPIC]
take over but OD insists on walking point. As they move out Hammer is killed by
a booby trap. The four survivors enter the village of their rendezvous destination
but find it deserted and burning, with civilians lying dead on the ground. The men
hunker down and await the he li cop ter but come under intense fire just as it arrives.
OD, LT, and Easy make it to the chopper but MoPic is shot and killed trying to
reach it, making the film just seen “found footage.”Reception
84 Charlie MoPic premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1989, where
it received a Grand Jury Prize nomination. A shoestring in de pen dent production,
the movie had a very limited theatrical release through New Century Vista in
March– April 1989 (just $154,264 in ticket sales). Principal revenues came from
the sale of cable TV broadcast rights to Cinemax and sales rights to Columbia
Pictures Home Entertainment for the VHS tape market. Besides the Sundance nom-
ination, 84 Charlie MoPic was nominated for two 1990 In de pen dent Spirit Awards.
Reviews were mostly positive. For Mike Pearson (Scripps- Howard), 84 Charlie MoPic
achieved “a haunting level of realism and resonance” (Pearson, 1989, p. 66). Roger
Ebert gave the film a qualified “thumbs up”: “The strength here is that the movie
seems to happen as we watch it. The tradeoff is that the director has less freedom
to pick and choose his shots for dramatic effect; once he establishes the point of
view, he’s stuck with it [but]... It is a brave and original attempt to rec ord noth-
ing more or less than the actual daily experience of a unit on patrol, drawn out of
the memories of men who were there” (Ebert, 1989).Reel History Versus Real History
Long- range reconnaissance patrols (LRRPs) were common during the Vietnam War:
23,000 were conducted, and they accounted for some 10,000 enemy killed in action
(KIA) through ambushes, airstrikes, and artillery. The LRRP depicted in 84 Char-
lie MoPic is credible in terms of its mission, size, configuration, and the armaments
carried. As is depicted in the movie, LRRPs were recon missions conducted by
squads of five to eight men, led by a seasoned noncommissioned officer (NCO),
and lightly armed for mobility’s sake. Still, cinematic imperatives clash with his-
torical realism in a number of ways. By their very nature, LRRPs were expected to
be stealthy. This meant taping down equipment, using hand signals, and talking
as little and as quietly as pos si ble to elude detection and avoiding contact with the
enemy. The soldiers on recon patrol in 84 Charlie MoPic talk constantly and loudly,
making for compelling storytelling but poor verisimilitude. The squad’s fateful deci-
sion to engage an enemy unit rather than going around it enlivens the action but
constitutes another violation of verisimilitude. Furthermore, as of February 1969,
all U.S. Army LRRP units were folded into the newly formed 75th Infantry Regi-
ment (Rangers), so a LRRP by a unit from the 173rd Airborne Brigade would have
been unlikely. As for a lone Army cameraman accompanying a LRRP for the pur-
poses of making a training film— this, too, is highly unlikely. The U.S. Army Sig-
nal Corps has been making training films since the 1930s but all of them have
been produced under controlled conditions far away from combat zones. Despite