Release CalendarTop 250 MoviesMost Popular MoviesBrowse Movies by GenreTop Box OfficeShowtimes & TicketsMovie NewsIndia Movie Spotlight
    What's on TV & StreamingTop 250 TV ShowsMost Popular TV ShowsBrowse TV Shows by GenreTV News
    What to WatchLatest TrailersIMDb OriginalsIMDb PicksIMDb SpotlightFamily Entertainment GuideIMDb Podcasts
    OscarsCannes Film FestivalStar WarsAsian Pacific American Heritage MonthSummer Watch GuideSTARmeter AwardsAwards CentralFestival CentralAll Events
    Born TodayMost Popular CelebsCelebrity News
    Help CenterContributor ZonePolls
For Industry Professionals
  • Language
  • Fully supported
  • English (United States)
    Partially supported
  • Français (Canada)
  • Français (France)
  • Deutsch (Deutschland)
  • हिंदी (भारत)
  • Italiano (Italia)
  • Português (Brasil)
  • Español (España)
  • Español (México)
Watchlist
Sign In
  • Fully supported
  • English (United States)
    Partially supported
  • Français (Canada)
  • Français (France)
  • Deutsch (Deutschland)
  • हिंदी (भारत)
  • Italiano (Italia)
  • Português (Brasil)
  • Español (España)
  • Español (México)
Use app
  • Cast & crew
  • User reviews
  • Trivia
IMDbPro

A Bright Shining Lie

  • TV Movie
  • 1998
  • R
  • 1h 58m
IMDb RATING
6.4/10
1.6K
YOUR RATING
A Bright Shining Lie (1998)
Home Video Trailer from HBO Home Video
Play trailer1:08
1 Video
11 Photos
DramaWar

True story of Army man John Paul Vann, whose military success provided him the fulfillment he never found in his personal life.True story of Army man John Paul Vann, whose military success provided him the fulfillment he never found in his personal life.True story of Army man John Paul Vann, whose military success provided him the fulfillment he never found in his personal life.

  • Director
    • Terry George
  • Writers
    • Neil Sheehan
    • Terry George
  • Stars
    • Bill Paxton
    • Bo Eason
    • William L. Mansey
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • IMDb RATING
    6.4/10
    1.6K
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • Terry George
    • Writers
      • Neil Sheehan
      • Terry George
    • Stars
      • Bill Paxton
      • Bo Eason
      • William L. Mansey
    • 23User reviews
    • 7Critic reviews
  • See production info at IMDbPro
    • Nominated for 1 Primetime Emmy
      • 4 nominations total

    Videos1

    A Bright Shining Lie
    Trailer 1:08
    A Bright Shining Lie

    Photos10

    View Poster
    View Poster
    View Poster
    View Poster
    View Poster
    View Poster
    View Poster
    View Poster

    Top cast65

    Edit
    Bill Paxton
    Bill Paxton
    • John Paul Vann
    Bo Eason
    • Officer Tally
    William L. Mansey
    • Officer Conroy
    Karina Logue
    Karina Logue
    • Barmaid
    Amy Madigan
    Amy Madigan
    • Mary Jane Vann
    Robert L. Hull
    • Bureaucrat Soldier
    Donal Logue
    Donal Logue
    • Steven Burnett
    'Josh' Somsak Orajan
    • Vann's ARVN Driver
    Harve Presnell
    Harve Presnell
    • MACV General
    Robert John Burke
    Robert John Burke
    • Frank Drummond
    Bill Whelan
    • Ron Dray
    Kay Tong Lim
    • Colonel Cao Huynh Van
    Seng Kawee
    • VC Leader
    • (as Kawee 'Seng' Sirikhanerut)
    Kajie Khan
    • Madame Nhu
    • (as Kajie Kahn)
    Vivian Wu
    Vivian Wu
    • Lee
    Van Thoa Trinh
    • VC Commander
    • (as Thoa Trinh Van)
    Richard Montgomery
    • General's Aide
    Andrew Borba
    Andrew Borba
    • Reporter #1 - Nick
    • Director
      • Terry George
    • Writers
      • Neil Sheehan
      • Terry George
    • All cast & crew
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

    User reviews23

    6.41.5K
    1
    2
    3
    4
    5
    6
    7
    8
    9
    10

    Featured reviews

    rmax304823

    Not the Usual Suspects

    The ordinary trajectory in a film like this during times like these is for Vann, like Philip Caputo, Ron Kowalsky and numerous other figures before him, to enter the service on the verge of exploding with patriotism, idealism, and gung-ho-ness, then to learn that the Vietnamese war was a big mistake as he is turned around by the events he witnesses. Kind of like what happens to David Janssen in "The Green Berets," only in reverse. Not so here. This is a complex and admirable story of a complex and not entirely admirable man. He is sent to Vietnam as a Lt. Colonel, bursting with enthusiasm and with his eye on promotions, true, but he does not undergo an epiphany in which God or the Buddha appears shaking a finger at him. He wants to win the war but feels it's being fought inefficiently. We need to coopt the communist revolution by getting rid of the corrupt and cowardly Vietnamese officers and giving the rice back to the peasants or something like that. He makes his views known to the press and is more or less forced to resign his commission. (The story is a bit murky on this point.) After a few years' dry spell at home he is called back to Vietnam as some sort of civilian advisor who now wears the two stars of a general and issues military orders. He has not lost his enthusiasm or his idealism and comes to believe that we can now win the war by conventional means, even after Tet. He orchestrates a heroic victory over the North Vietnamese army, then his career ends, as does his life. That's not what I would call the usual ten-cent trajectory in character development. It isn't nearly linear enough. And in that nonlinearity it resembles life more than it does fiction. Is Vann a hero? Undoubtedly. Is he a good man? Well -- yes and no. After his marriage (to the character played by Amy Madigan) he sleeps with the 15-year-old babysitter. In Vietnam he evidently lies to a beautiful young woman he seduces and tells her he's separated from his wife. On his return to Vietnam he looks up the girl again. She seems just as gorgeous, at least to these eyes, but she's changed her hair or something so he avoids her. Instead he takes up with a schoolgirl and gets her pregnant. When confronted with his self-evident guilt by the girl's father, he marries her. On the other hand, he doesn't smoke or drink. There is an attempt to account for his misbehavior by means of some half-hearted palaver about how his mother was a whore. He was an illegitimate child and blames this status for keeping him out of West Point and getting him booted out of the army. The film betrays itself here if the writers and producers really meant to put forward this information as a pat explanation of his various failures, but if they meant it mainly as the way the protagonist attempts to justify God's ways to Vann, they hit the nail on the head. (Sure I'm flawed. Wouldn't you be, with a mother like mine?) The combat scenes are pretty effective, and so is Ed Lauter, playing a sympathetic guy for a change. Too bad the leads aren't. Whatever "charisma" means, Bill Paxton as Vann doesn't have it, though he looks the part; and the reporter from the New York Times, with whom Vann has a falling out, generates a rather large hole whenever he is on screen. The girls are indescribably delicious. Neil Sheehan, on whose book this story was based, has a tendency to stretch for drama and characters that aren't there. His earlier book could not turn the Captain of the USS Vance into Queeg. But judging from this film, he has presented a more complicated picture of a man here, a more adult portrait, warts and all. All together, the time spent watching this movie is well spent. I'm not sure how close I would like to get to a man who didn't smoke or drink and who called down artillery fire on his own position but it's fascinating to know something about him at this remove.
    10jhcc77954

    As it really was

    The movie showed it like it really was. I did not know Vann, but two Colonels that I know did work with him. It shows who really ran the war in Vietnam. It shows Westmoreland for what he was too. The best part is that it shows how the Military had little or no say in conducting the war. It lets us see that it was a political war and that maybe it could have had a different outcome if it had been pursued correctly. The action is good, and it is authentic. Paxton is intense. His performance is often complimented on that he could have actually been Vann. Or that he could actually have been in a war. TYhe battle sequences are realistic without being overly bloody. The dialog was well presented and was mostly believable.
    7Jakeroo

    The book is so good there is no way the movies can live up to it.

    However, all hands do a credible job and it's worth watching. However, like most movies about Vietnam, it depressed me: the tragedy & the waste are almost overwhelming!
    8tgtround

    A Great Effort

    While not in the same league as Go Tell The Spartans, which had the presence of Burt Lancaster if nothing else, this is a commendable effort to bring a huge and impressive piece of non-fiction to the screen.

    Never shown in the cinema in the UK, my wife and I saw it on imported DVD. She was very impressed (having not read the book) and thought it conveyed something of the complexity of the subject very well and was very enlightening.
    8tom-darwin

    A Soldier with a Sordid Past Devoted to a Doomed War

    Neil Sheehan's masterpiece tells the Vietnam War story through a single biography. John Paul Vann was an American who overcame a humble background & made a distinctive, heroic career as a soldier, adding a beautiful wife & 3 kids along the way. Preparing for promotion to high rank, he went to Vietnam in the early 1960s as an adviser, one of the select few to take the fight against Communism right into combat. But Vann was also a man with deep personal issues: haunting, shaming memories of childhood poverty, a weak father & a libertine mother, leading perhaps to his own aggressive infidelities including one with an underaged girl that nearly led to court-martial. And his "fight" in Vietnam was merely a series of bureaucratic exercises in which the Americans were bogged down by South Vietnamese intrigues, both unwilling & unable to do what was necessary to defeat the Communists. Terry George explores this theme with the steady pace, methodical yet engrossing, that was later such a triumph in the remarkably similar "Hotel Rwanda." Paxton has his work cut out as the very complicated Vann, a dedicated soldier who is not only everything an Army officer should be, but also a true warrior whose devotion to victory trumps his loyalty to the establishment & thus even his own career. Yet Sheehan's Vann has a shocking capacity for self-harm, hating the ignominious background that was not his fault, indulging himself in sexual adventures that wounded his family & threatened his career as readily as he embarked on reckless combat missions. It's all Paxton's show & he takes us on a fascinating odyssey of an officer whose slow realization that the Army would rather lose the war by the book than win it by tossing away the book (it's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game?) causes him to leave the Army but, after a short, sad foray into business, return to Vietnam as a civilian administrator who steadily accumulates unique, vast military authority. Paxton's Vann wants to understand Vietnam's people & culture--but only enough to help him in his war effort--leading him to turn his back on his tormented family & take a Vietnamese wife (Wu). But for Vann, everything in his life is devoted to victory, a personal goal, an intense obsession, that he will achieve whether America or Vietnam like it or not. Paxton is suitably restrained, uttering no war cries like Stallone or Norris, making no personal journey of self-awareness or redemption as in "Apocalypse Now" or "Uncommon Valor." The professionalism of the art of war is his mantra, the belief that the everlasting principles of the true warrior will realize the high ideals of democracy & capitalism over the despair of communism. George doesn't give Paxton the opportunity to go too deeply into Vann's personal life (the book WAS very long, after all), so Vann comes across as a complex but not quite complete antihero. The other actors are there to help paint the Vann picture rather than those of their own characters. Madigan is very fine as Vann's loyal wife driven to despair as much by Vann's obsession with the abstract concept of victory as his gross infidelities. The superb Kurtwood Smith gives the best film portrayal of Westmoreland ever on screen--decisive, firm, unapproachable, unhearing--though he has only minutes to do it. Kay Tong Lim is as restrained as Paxton in depicting the clever Colonel Cao, Vann's ARVN partner & as self-serving as Vann is idealistic, who goes from being Vann's great hope to his frustration to his nemesis. The action scenes are low-budget & unremarkable, but audiences were long ago falsely conditioned to view Vietnam as a series of either personal or spectacular cowboy-vs-Indian fights. Vann's presentations for Pentagon & White House big-shots, in which he dramatically holds up handfuls of rice to underscore the importance of winning over Vietnam's farmers, are far more poignant. If the Vann of Sheehan, George & Paxton has a valediction, it's that the war was lost in Washington, not in the field--a view that's hardly original but is still very hard to wrap one's mind around. Many viewers will find "A Bright, Shining Lie" quite unsatisfying entertainment, but that's the problem with dramatizing nonfiction, the risk of presenting a story that's trying to teach. But, if it tries to teach, it doesn't try to preach, and at least the sun doesn't set in the East.

    More like this

    Soldier Blue
    6.9
    Soldier Blue
    The Odd Angry Shot
    6.6
    The Odd Angry Shot
    The Last Full Measure
    6.8
    The Last Full Measure
    Danger Close
    6.8
    Danger Close
    Villa Rides
    6.3
    Villa Rides
    The Good Life
    6.4
    The Good Life
    Dead Men Don't Count
    6.1
    Dead Men Don't Count
    Rough Riders
    7.3
    Rough Riders
    Traveller
    6.1
    Traveller
    Twister: Ride It Out
    6.9
    Twister: Ride It Out
    Hunter Killer
    6.6
    Hunter Killer
    Resistance
    5.4
    Resistance

    Storyline

    Edit

    Did you know

    Edit
    • Trivia
      The Movie was shot in Lompburi, Thailand and in Cirebon in Central Java, Indonesia. During the filming, the Major of Cirebon City Kumaedhi Syafrudin showed up at one of the filming locations in Cirebon. The Movie Director Terry George also allowed Cirebon City Major Kumaedhi Syafrudin to shoot one of the action sequences of the film.
    • Goofs
      When unzipping a body bag containing the body of a dead soldier, you can see the actor portraying the dead soldier flinching because of the zipper. And a mere couple of seconds later, he flinches again as the dog-tag is ripped from his neck.
    • Quotes

      John: It is not true that we are here to solve problems, sir. WE are the problem.

    • Connections
      Featured in The 50th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards (1998)
    • Soundtracks
      Somebody to Love
      Written by Darby Slick

      Performed by Jefferson Airplane

      Courtesy of The RCA Records Label of BMG Entertainment

    Top picks

    Sign in to rate and Watchlist for personalized recommendations
    Sign in

    Details

    Edit
    • Release date
      • May 30, 1998 (United States)
    • Country of origin
      • United States
    • Languages
      • English
      • Vietnamese
    • Also known as
      • Mentiras de guerra
    • Filming locations
      • Lompburi, Thailand
    • Production companies
      • Home Box Office (HBO)
      • Labrador Films
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Tech specs

    Edit
    • Runtime
      1 hour 58 minutes
    • Color
      • Color
    • Sound mix
      • Dolby

    Related news

    Contribute to this page

    Suggest an edit or add missing content
    A Bright Shining Lie (1998)
    Top Gap
    By what name was A Bright Shining Lie (1998) officially released in Canada in English?
    Answer
    • See more gaps
    • Learn more about contributing
    Edit page

    More to explore

    Recently viewed

    Please enable browser cookies to use this feature. Learn more.
    Get the IMDb app
    Sign in for more accessSign in for more access
    Follow IMDb on social
    Get the IMDb app
    For Android and iOS
    Get the IMDb app
    • Help
    • Site Index
    • IMDbPro
    • Box Office Mojo
    • License IMDb Data
    • Press Room
    • Advertising
    • Jobs
    • Conditions of Use
    • Privacy Policy
    • Your Ads Privacy Choices
    IMDb, an Amazon company

    © 1990-2025 by IMDb.com, Inc.